Islamophobia AffUM 7wS

They never loved us

1ac
Domestic surveillance is a militarized, extrajudicial tool used to
target Muslims and black people birthed from COINTELPRO.
The death of black and brown bodies and pervasiveness of
surveillance is now so common that it is both banal and
unnoticed.
We begin by mourning Luqman Abdullah, a Muslim imam and
community activist who served thousands while renouncing
violence. Peaceful community service couldnt save himhe
was unfinished business from COINTELPRO and was
surveilled, infiltrated and assassinated by federal agents
because he dared to challenge imperialism and structual
oppression
Kundnani, 15Arun, Professor of Terror Studies and Media @ NYU & John Jay
College, formerly a Fellow @ Leiden U (Netherlands), an Open Society Fellow, and
Editor of Race and Class. The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and
the Domestic War on Terror, p. 1-5 BR
Death came instantly to Imam Luqman, as four FBI agents fired semiautomatic rifles
from a few feet away. Sixty law enforcement officers-including a special operations
team the FBI had flown in from Quantico, Virginia, a SWAT team from the FBI's
Detroit field office, and officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police-had
surrounded the warehouse in Dearborn, Michigan, where the imam and his four
colleagues were loading television sets into a trailer on the morning of October 28,
2009. Luqman Abdullah had been the leader of the Al-Haqq Mosque on Detroit's
impoverished West Side for thirty years . Every Sunday he and his followers had run
a soup kitchen, providing some of the basic needs of the local community. The
majority of the people in the neighborhood were either unemployed or in low-paying
jobs, and they depended on such initiatives for their survival. The landscape of
mostly empty and burned-out buildings was testimony to the exodus of huge
swathes of the city's population and the practice of families sharing houses when
they could no longer afford the rent on their own homes. Imam Luqman was a
familiar face, always available to help out Muslim and non-Muslim alike. His favorite
word was "grassroots, says his son Omar Regan.
He had a strong desire to change the neighborhood. He believed that Islam
would help people get off drugs, alcohol, and depression. But he wouldn't
even really preach for them to be Muslim more than he would push for them
to at least act like they were Muslim. He'd just give it to you real. Everybody
always talked to him, because they appreciated his direct approach. He
believed we got to change the condition of our people, because the
government ain't going to do it. And he would say we need to stand up and
fight for our rights, because the government's pushing us around, trying to

make us feel like we got something to do with 9/11 when we ain't got nothing
to do with that kind of stuff. That's how my dad would talkhe's from back in
the sixties.1
Luqman Abdullah had converted to Islam in the early 1980s, after serving in the
military and then falling into depression. The inspiration for his conversion was Jamil
al-Amin, who in the 1960s, under the name of H. Rap Brown, had been a leading
activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Over the
course of a decade, in the face of racist violence and the Democratic Party's
sluggish response to the organization's attempts to break southern segregation,
SNCC had radicalized; it came to advocate black power and opposition to the
Vietnam war, and eventually merged with the Black Panther Party. Rap Brown rose
to the top of the FBI's target list of black revolutionaries, and soon enough, the
bureau found its opportunity to imprison him-on incitement to riot charges. Brown
converted to orthodox Islam while in prison in New York in 1971 for reasons no
doubt similar to those which led Luqman Abdullah to do the same a decade later.
For both, Islam preached active struggle for racial justice alongside individual
spiritual development; it offered a way to live and a vision of a better life . This
interpretation of Islam offered a framework for continuing the black radical tradition
of the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X after a period of defeat for black political
struggle. The FBl's Counterintelligence Program (known as COINTELPRO) had
secretly destabilized the movement and entrapped its activists. Brown, now
calling himself Jamil al-Amin, was released from prison in 1976 and settled in
Atlanta, Georgia. He opened a community grocery store and helped rid the
neighborhood of drugs. But he continued to face regular law enforcement
harassment and arbitrary arrests. Eventually, in 2000, al-Amin was arrested on
murder charges after a shootout with two Fulton County Sheriff 's deputies occurred.
Al-Amin was identified by the surviving officer as the shooter who had been
wounded in the exchange of gunfire-even though he had no injuries and another
person had confessed to the crime. He is now caged in the "domestic Guantanamo;'
the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, where the US government incarcerates
those it accuses of being among the most dangerous al-Qaeda terrorists.
By the time the war on terror was launched in 2001 much of the sixties generation
of black radical activists had been exhausted, co-opted, imprisoned, or killed , to
a large degree victims of the FBI's efforts to destroy the movement. But Luqman
Abdullah, who was leading the campaign to free Jamil al-Amin, was still preaching
radicalism to his small congregation in Detroit. As Omar Regan puts it, he was
"unfinished business" from the days of COINTELPRO. And now the war on terror
provided a new lens through which to view his activities. Soon the FBI was
categorizing Abdullah as a "highly placed leader of a nationwide radical
fundamentalist Sunni group consisting primarily of African-Americans" who had
called his followers to "an offensive jihad, rather than a defensive jihad [in order] to
establish a separate, sovereign Islamic state . . . within the borders of the United
States, governed by Shariah law:'2 The implication was that he shared an ideology
with al-Qaeda. In the sixties, figures such as Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali had
been portrayed by the media as "Muslim extremists"; now a new set of images of

Islamic extremism had come to the fore, images that could be used to manufacture
an ideological connection between a radical black preacher on Detroit's West Side
and the events of September 11, 2001.
In 2007, the FBI found its opportunity to begin targeting Imam Luqman's mosque. A
member of the congregation had recently been arrested on murder charges, and in
a deal with law enforcement, he agreed to work with the counterterrorism squad of
the FBI's Detroit field office as part of a sting operation. Two other informants were
also recruited, and a two-year undercover operation to infiltrate the mosque began.
Many of the congregants had criminal records; all were struggling with poverty. The
offer of an FBI payout was bound to be tempting. And when the FBI implemented its
plan to lure those around Imam Luqman into helping fence stolen goods, it is easy
to see how some of them were drawn in. The FBI's informants pretended they had a
contact who needed help moving merchandise stolen from trucking companies. Just
for turning up to discuss the plan, the contact, played by an FBI agent, gave
everyone one hundred dollars. The second time they met, the FBI undercover agent
paid one thou sand dollars to the group before anything had even happened, and
promised another fifteen hundred dollar payment the following night. All they had
to do was turn up at a warehouse in Dearborn and help move what they thought
were stolen television sets and laptops from one semitrailer to another. This was
repeated a number of times over the coming months, gradually drawing Imam
Luqman himself into the operation so that he would also be present at the FBI's
warehouse when the time came to carry out the raid.
An indictment was issued against Imam Luqman the day before the raid in October
2009 that charged him with conspiracy to sell stolen goods transported in interstate
commerce, firearms possession violations, and alterations to a vehicle identification
number. No terrorism-related charges were included, despite the involvement of the
FBI's counterterrorism squad and the multiagency Joint Terrorism Task Force. But the
indictment included claims, based on reports by the FBI-paid infiltrators, of
conversations in which Imam Luqman had advocated "the spread of Islam through
violent jihad, and violence against the United States government and against law
enforcement:'3 These claims were never tested in court, since Iman Luqman was
dead, and none of these conversations were taped . In one of the few conversations
that was recorded by an informant, Imam Luqman was asked to donate money for
someone to "do something" during the Super Bowl in Detroit. But he replied that he
would not be involved in injuring innocent people . There seems little doubt
that Imam Luqman viewed the US government as an oppressor and called on his
followers to organize against it. Like the Black Panther Party, members of the
mosque also carried guns. But there was no evidence of any plot to carry out a
terrorist attack, just small time hustlers in an impoverished neighborhood struggling
to pay the bills while denouncing America. As Abdullah Bey el-Amin, another
African-American imam from the same neighborhood and a friend of Imam Luqman,
put it, the radical talk was no more than selling wolf tickets"street-corner
bragging. "You don't need all these crack-shot FBI and helicopters for somebody
stealing a laptop:'4 Andrew Arena, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Detroit
field office, maintains that Imam Luqman was "the leader of a domestic terrorist

group. When asked why no terrorism charges were brought, he replied: Theres a
lot of cases where we don't charge a person with terrorism. We charge them with
whatever we can, to get them off the streets. With no evidence of terrorism strong
enough to hold up in a court, some other charge had to be concocted. But at the
same time, in order to justify a sting operation on this scale, journalists were told
that the mosque was a hotbed of violent fundamentalists. It proved easier to
convict the imam of terrorism in the court of public opinion than in a court of
law.
When the time came to finally spring their trap, the FBI's informants once again
lured Imam Luqman to the Dearborn warehouse. At a prearranged time, the three
informants exited the warehouse and explosives were let off inside as a distraction.
A dozen federal agents approached Imam Luqman and his colleagues and
commanded them to get down and show their hands. His four associates complied,
but Imam Luqman delayed for a moment. Accounts of what happened next differ.
Most likely suspecting that Imam Luqman was hiding a gun, the agents released a
dog trained to grab an arm and, as the dog bit at his face, Imam Luqman fired at its
chest, prompting return fire from four of the agents, who were positioned nearby,
killing him instantly. While an agent handcuffed his body as it lay motionless on the
warehouse floor, the police dog was evacuated by helicopter to a hospital for
possible life-saving treatment. The federal agents commented later that in the
seconds before they opened fire, Imam Luqman was looking directly at them and
did not appear to be afraid.6
A thousand people attended the four-mile procession to Imam Luqman's funeral.
The Department of Justice exonerated the FBI's handling of the arrest and declared
his killing lawful. But there is little doubt that had the government chosen not to
infiltrate his mosque and entrap him in a criminal conspiracy of its own invention,
he would still be alive.
The killing of Imam Luqman barely registered in the news media . From one
point of view, the manner of his death was hardly different from dozens of other
killings of African Americans each year at the hands of militarized law enforcement
agencies.7 From another perspective, he resembled the thousands of unnamed
militants killed by drones in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Whether as an "Islamic
extremist" or as an African American, his death was a perfectly normal
occurrence. If the war on terror was the stuff of high-profile debates about war,
torture, and surveillance in the Bush years, under President Obama it became a
matter of bureaucratic routine, undramatic and unopposed. Although Obama
was elected on a wave of opposition to Bush's war on terror, he then failed to take
the US in a fundamentally different direction; the administration thereby effectively
neutered any remaining opposition and made permanent what had been a "state of
emergency:' The minor shifts that did occur were largely already in train in the
closing years of the Bush administration. Obama continued along the same track
with the same aim in mind: to find ways to continue projecting force in the Middle
East and to maintain a national security state at home-but without the noisy and
divisive political conflicts that had plagued Bush from 2003 onward. Thus, the
US military occupation of Iraq was wound down while the war in Afghanistan, where

the number of US troops was trebled, was presented as the "good war:' The number
of prisoners at Guantanamo was decreased by around a third, but the 171 who
remained were slated for indefinite detention in what was now a permanent
internment camp. Speaking in Cairo in 2009, Obama attempted to draw a line
through the clash of civilizations imagery of the post-9/11 period and offered
instead a picture of respectful dialogue between cultures. But he did so without
offering any of the changes in US foreign policy that would give such rhetoric
substance. The PATRIOT Act was renewed and the state secrets doctrine was
invoked to protect Bush-era officials from prosecution for their torture policy.
Extraordinary rendition was wound down, while extrajudicial killings were stepped
up.8 The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called it the "new normal:'9 The very
banality of counterterrorism discourse secured its ideological power much more
effectively than the confrontational rewriting-the-rules strategy of the Bush years.
Neoconservatives invented the terror war, but Obama liberalism normalized it, at
which point, mainstream journalists stopped asking questions.
What should, by any objective measure, have been the moment the war on terror
finally ended actually marked its entry into banality . The killing of Osama bin Laden
on May 2, 2011,just a few months before the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11
attacks, came as uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were providing a practical refutation
of al-Qaeda's argument that violence against Western civilians was the only way to
defeat the near enemy of autocratic regimes in the Middle East. Yet the terror war
did not end. The chants of "U-S-A on the streets of New York and Washington, led
by Democrats happy that their president now had his own narrative of conquest,
captured the mood. What was being celebrated was a victory in a continuing war
rather than the outbreak of peace. There was little chance that this would be a
moment to remember the hundreds of thousands killed around the world as a result
of the conflict between al-Qaeda and Western governments. On that Sunday night,
hours after bin Laden's death, CNN's resident terrorism expert, Peter Bergen,
announced that it would mean the end of the war on terror. By Monday morning,
after Hillary Clinton had said "the fight continues;' he was back on to correct his
earlier assessment, echoing the official line: there could be no end to the war.10 A
war that from the beginning had no clear limits or objectives could not now be
concluded with the death of one man. The Authorization for Use of Military Force
Against Terrorists, passed by Congress three days after 9/11, established the war on
terror paradigm of an open-ended, perpetual, global war. Today the Obama
administration continues to rely on that authorization for the claim that it has a
legal basis to carry out extrajudicial killings without geographical limit.11 The
enemy had come to be understood as more than a single individual or organization;
it was a set of ideas-radical Islam-that was defined vaguely enough that even the
death of bin Laden would not halt the hundreds of billions of dollars in spending the
war involved. Thus, the national security pundits warned, even greater dangers
lurked at this very moment of apparent victory. The same terrorism experts who
with the death of bin Laden pronounced the near elimination of what they called
"core al-Qaeda" in Pakistan and Afghanistan also heralded new threats of Muslim
radicalization in other parts of the world: Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Europe, and in
the US itself. If the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had been justified on the grounds

that fighting them "over there" was the best way to prevent attacks "over here;' a
new phase of the war on terror under President Obama intensified the fear that
Western Muslim citizens were also a threat.
In August 2011, the White House published its new strategy to prevent violent
extremism within the US, which for the first time referred to the need to combat the
circulation of extremist ideology among American Muslims. 12 The following month
the US government used Predator drones to kill two American citizens in YemenAnwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. Security officials described the two as
"radicalizers" who had pioneered the use of the Internet to influence Western
Muslims. 13 It was the first time the US government had openly ordered the
extrajudicial killing of its own citizens. In another drone attack three weeks
later, al-Awlaki's sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman, was killed, along with his
teenage cousin and at least five other civilians.14 Former White House press
secretary Robert Gibbs, then a senior adviser to Obama's reelection campaign,
was asked by journalists about the killing; he said Abdulrahman should have had "a
far more responsible father:'15 Congress began to consider the National Defense
Authorization Act at the same time, which would not only lead to Guantanamo being
kept open indefinitely but also codify the indefinite military detention without trial of
American citizens arrested on US soil. President Obama declined to veto the act.
The common theme in these developments was the focus of the war on terror on
the domestic front: the enemy now existed as much among our fellow citizens as in
foreign lands. The government was no longer imagining the threat as foreign
terrorist sleepers living among ordinary American Muslims; now it was the
radicalization of ordinary American Muslims themselves that it feared. Polling
carried out after bin Laden's killing suggested that Americans were more anxious
about Muslim Americans being terrorists than they had been before. 16

Luqman Abdullahs targeting didnt begin after 9/11it began

in the middle passage. After Abdullah and others formed a
kinship with Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey to attempt to
achieve liberation from white supremacy, mainstream Muslim
organizations were targeted and shifted to the fatal decision
to instead try to pass as the model minority out of fear.
That whiteness card was quickly revoked after the Cold War
and 9/11, when Islam was violently converted from a religion
to a racethe process of racialization. Instead of protesting
racialized mass violence, many Muslims again doubled-down
on loyalty proclamations to the U.S., a survival strategy that
accepted Muslims as second-class citizens begging for
patriotic forgiveness.

Vote for the team that best promotes broader action against
structural racism by promoting student subject formation
through dissent this is the best way to challenge structural
oppression and government brutality
Kundnani, 15Arun, Professor of Terror Studies and Media @ NYU & John Jay
College, formerly a Fellow @ Leiden U (Netherlands), an Open Society Fellow, and
Editor of Race and Class. The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and
the Domestic War on Terror, p. 41-54 BR
In July 2011, Arizonans complained that local television news stations were referring
to the massive dust storms that sweep through the state as "haboobs, an Arabic
term long used by meterologists in the Southwest. One resident wrote to a local
newspaper asking: "How do they think our soldiers feel coming back to Arizona and
hearing some Middle Eastern term?"22 One wonders if soldiers would also object to
their children learning algebra. That "some Middle Eastern term" could provoke this
reaction points to the way in which signifiers of perceived alien cultures can
designate racialized enemies. Just as the story of Muslim identity in Britain is
inseparable from questions of race, so too is race a necessary part of understanding
what it means to be Muslim in the US. In both settings, the social history of Muslim
life attests to the shifting construction and reconstruction of racial meanings.
Compared to the UK, the American Muslim population is less concentrated on South
Asia as a region of origin. In the last fifty years, Muslims have settled in the US from
various Arab countries, other countries in Asia and Africa, Turkey, Iran, and
southeastern Europe and different parts of this mixed Muslim population have
experienced distinct patterns of racialization. It is estimated that 20 to 30 percent
of Muslims in the US are African. Indeed, one in four of those brought to the
Americas with the Atlantic slave trade originated from Muslim-majority parts of West
Africa. The 1977 television miniseries Roots, based on Alex Haley's novel, reflected
historical realities when it portrayed Kunta Kinte, the African captured as an
adolescent and sold into slavery in the US, as a Muslim.24 By the late nineteenth
century the African-American connection to Islam had been largely erased, but as
blacks moved north from southern segregation, they began to forge new and
syncretic religious movements, often oriented toward Islam. Meetings of Marcus
Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem often featured South
Asian missionaries of the Ahmadiyya sect, who claimed kinship with African
Americans because of their own hardships under British colonialism. The Moorish
Science Temple, formed in Newark in 1913 by an African American named Timothy
Drew (who renamed himself Noble Drew Ali), was the first significant organization in
the US to identify itself as Islamic, though its knowledge of Muslim life in other parts
of the world was sketchy. In 1926, the Egyptian Duse Mohamed Ali formed the
Universal Islamic Society in Detroit, a precursor to Wallace Fard Muhammad's Nation
of lslam, which was founded in the city four years later. These heterodox forms of
religious practice were attractive as a basis for both spiritual salvation and
reconceptualizing what it meant to be a black American. By proclaiming themselves
"Moorish Americans" or ''Asiatics" rather than "Negros;' followers imaginatively left

behind their racial subordination within the US and aligned themselves with a
transnational Islamic community, within which racial classifications were
transcended. 25 Islam became known as a religion that freed its followers from
America's racial definitions; the impact in the black community went beyond the
number of actual followers.26 When Malcolm X claimed conscientious objector
status during the Korean War draft, he identified his country of citizenship as Asia .
By the early 1960s, when he was the Nation of Islam's most dynamic leader, the
organization had attracted a membership of tens of thou sands and the admiration
of millions.27
As well as a base for new forms of African-American religion, Detroit, and the
neighboring factory city of Dearborn, built by Henry Ford, were also major centers of
Arab immigration in the twentieth century. The majority of Arab immigrants to the
US have been Christians, but in later decades Muslims made up an increasing
proportion. Arab Americans are reckoned to make up around a quarter of Muslims in
the US today.28 Ford began recruiting Palestinians, Yemenis, and Lebanese to work
in his auto factories in 1913. Arab communities sprung up around the auto plants,
the largest in the South end area of Dearborn, in the shadow of Ford's mammoth
River Rouge complex. By the early 1970s, two thousand Arab Americans were
working at Chrysler's Dodge Main auto plant in Detroit. Like black workers, they
were singled out for worse conditions in an attempt to divide the work force along
ethnic lines and undermine industrial labor organizing, following a tradition of racial
division first systematized by Henry Ford. In 1973, three thousand Arab workers
staged a militant parade through the streets of Dearborn to protest the leadership
of the United Auto Workers; the union was accused of aligning itself with manage
ment and white workers, marginalizing blacks and Arabs, and purchasing $300,000
in Israeli bonds, in effect supporting the military occupation of Palestinian
territories.29 (Arabs, mainly from Yemen, were also a significant segment of the
agricultural work force California in the 1960s and 1970s, and were active in Cesar
Chavez's United Farm Workers union.) 30 As a result of the auto industry,
Dearborn became a national center of Arab-American life, even as, with the
decline of US manufacturing, its communities were forced to seek new kinds of
work. ''Ask any family in Dearborn where their father used to work;' notes Rachid
Elabed, a local youth worker, and they will say Chrysler, Ford, or GM. My dad
worked at Ford. My uncle worked at GM. A lot of those jobs have gone now. Most
Arab Americans went into small businesses: running gas stations, groceries, you
name it.31
Today, despite the working-class black and Arab origins of American Islam, the
mean family income of Muslims in the US is roughly similar to that of the population
as a whole. For every cab driver, cleaner, or unemployed refugee there is a doctor
or engineer living in the suburbs.32 Following reforms of immigration policy in 1965,
the US government began to carefully admit selected immigrants from Africa, Asia,
and the Middle East. Who was allowed to settle was fine-tuned to the needs of US
capitalism, and the geopolitical imperatives of the cold war. High-flying students
from the Third World were recruited to American campuses as part of a brain drain
rivalry with the Soviet Union. Many, including significant numbers of Muslims,

stayed on. The proportion of South Asians in America's Muslim population increased.
These settlers were destined for professional employment-the immigration selection
process had already filtered out those without technical or professional skills of use
to the US economy. But it was easy for Asians themselves and others to believe
there was something inherent to ''Asian culture" that made them a model minority
in the US against which blacks and Latinos could be unfavorably compared.33
For the new Arab-American middle class there was the possibility of making what
the law scholar John Tehranian has called a " Faustian pact with whiteness": choosing
to pass as white in order to avoid racial discrimination . 34 The US government's
Office of Management and Budget, which is responsible for identifying official racial
and ethnic categories, formally defines people from "Europe, the Middle East, or
North Africa'' as white.35 Assimilation to a suburban American whiteness was an
option for many Arab Americans, especially Christians and nonpracticing Muslims,
but it came at a price: collective invisibility and loss of identity. In its own way, this
invisibility amounted to a form of second-class citizenship within the emerging
parameters of post-Civil Rights Act multiculturalism : hiding in the mainstream was a
racial performance that threatened to fall flat if the actors raised political issues on
behalf of their group. When Arab organizations turned to the question of Palestine,
they quickly lost their whiteness and came to be seen as dangerous aliens.
In the late 1960s, Arab Americans formed organizations such as the Association of
Arab-American University Graduates and the Organization of Arab Students to
contest US support of Israeli aggression in the Middle East. These were immediately
the target of the pro- Israel lobby, which portrayed Arab activists as spies and
foreign radicals.36 In 1972, the Nixon administration issued a set of directives
known as Operation Boulder that enabled the FBI and CIA to coordinate with the
pro-Israel lobby, subjecting nonviolent Arab-American political activists to
surveillance and harassment.37 Such surveillance continued into the 1980s, as
media coverage of the Iranian revolution and conflict in the Middle East gave rise to
new stereotypes of Arabs as dangerous fanatics. In 1985, Alex Odeh, a leader of the
American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in California, was murdered in a
bomb attack, likely carried out by the Jewish Defense League.38 Two years later, the
FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. (INS) arrested seven
Palestinians and the Kenyan wife of one of them in Los Angeles, accusing them of
distributing subversive literature. The investigation turned up no criminal activity
but, as foreign nationals, the "LAS" were nevertheless vulnerable to deportation
proceedings due to their political allegiance, under the McCarthy-era McCarranWalter Act. Government documents made it clear the aim was to disrupt
constitutionally protected political activity.39 The government continued its
efforts to deport them until it finally gave up twenty years after the initial
arrests. Around the time of the arrests, a secret INS document was leaked to the Los
Angeles Times. It outlined plans for the roundup of up to five thousand foreign
nationals suspected of links to "terrorism"-i.e., support for the Palestinian cause-and
their incarceration in camps in Louisiana. The May 1986 document, entitled "Alien
Terrorists and Undesirables: A Contingency Plan;' detailed how "selected aliens"
from eight Middle Eastern countries who were suspected of being "engaged in

support of terrorism'' could be arrested on nebulous charges and deported on the

basis of secret evidence.40
It was in the 1980s that the template of the war on terror was first hammered out: a
fight against terrorism as ideological cover for state violence directed at those
resisting US and Israeli power, whether they happened to be terrorists or not; a
selective use of the term "terrorism'' to exclude all those state and nonstate
actors using violence to achieve our political ends (such as the Contras in
Nicaragua); and a suturing of Israel and the US as defenders of "Western values "
against "Islamic fanaticism:' The message worked perfectly for the US television
news audiences. The idea that Israel might be involved in suppressing a legitimate
movement for national liberation became unthinkable. Much of the groundwork for
this approach was laid by Benjamin Netanyahu, then the Israeli permanent
representative to the United Nations, through a conference organized in
Washington, DC, in 1984. In a subsequent collection of articles edited by
Netanyahu- entitled Terrorism: How the West Can Win-a number of contributors
argued that terrorist violence was endemic to Islam. For instance, the political
scientist P. J. Vatikiotis claimed that terrorism is rooted in the "dichotomy, in fact,
between the Islamic and all other systems of government and authority;' an
ideological clash that is "clear, sharp, and permanent" and "marked by hostility:'
While he accepted their "nothing in Islamic doctrine links it specifically to terrorism;'
there is nevertheless "a general Islamic injunction that power belongs to the
believers for use against unbelievers, and that the latter should be fought until the
earthly order is established under Allah:'41 President Reagan reportedly decided to
launch his attack on Libya in 1986 after reading excerpts from the conference in
Time magazine.42 The Reagan administration was further encouraged by Claire
Sterling's book The Terror Network, which claimed the Soviet Union was conducting
a secret campaign of terrorism against the West.43 When Reagan's newly appointed
CIA director, William Casey, told his analysts to investigate the book's claims,
he was unaware that its findings were in part based on earlier CIA disinformation
campaigns in Italy, the aim of which had been to deliberately confuse terrorism
with communism. 44
Terrorism became the number-one foreign policy issue for
the US. The link in the popular mind between Islam and terrorism was sealed .
Cultural theorist Edward Said described how, by the late 1980s, Islam called up
"images of bearded clerics and mad suicidal bombers , of unrelenting Iranian
mullahs, fanatical fundamentalists, and kidnappers, remorseless turbaned crowds
who chant hatred of the US, 'the great devil; and all its ways. 45
By the end of the cold war the model minority, or passing-for white,
approaches were becoming less workable for American Muslims . US
multiculturalism had tended to function as a selective openness to ethnic identity,
requiring that groups entering the main stream abandon any desire to reshape the
basic contours of American political life. Cultural diversity was tolerated up to the
point that it challenged the continuity of the existing system. In the early twentieth
century, Jews and southern Europeans were welcomed into the American
mainstream if they distanced themselves from communism and anarchism; to those
who did not, the state responded with the Palmer raids and deportation. But for

American Muslims, the perceived association with radicalism and terrorism was
getting harder to avoid. The experience of Rehan Ansari, a Pakistani living in New
York in the 1990s, was typical of the Muslim professional class:
I had a job on Wall Street with a brokerage house in 1993 and one of the
brokers used to think it was funny asking me how the Hizbollah was doing at
least once every morning. He used to like rolling the word around in his
mouth. My response to him was model minority. When the World Trade Center
bombing happened that year, I was no longer with the firm and wondered
what he would say if we were to meet again.46
For reasons similar to those in the UK, Muslim identity became an increasingly
common basis for community organization in the US of the 1990s. These
organizations had grown from the root of the Muslim Student Association (MSA),
which had been created at a meeting at the University of Illinois, ChampaignUrbana, in 1963. The MS.A's early activists were students from the Middle East and
South Asia who had been influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-i-Islami
movements in their home countries. After their studies, they settled in the US and
took up professional jobs, and were conservative in religion and politics; the local
and national organizations they founded, such as the Islamic Society of North
America (ISNA), reflected this. Some, having been active in Islamic politics in the
dangerous context of Arab autocracies, now wanted to leave political activism
behind; for them, the chief objective of Muslims in America should be to preserve
cultural and religious identity within the framework of official multiculturalism while
assimilating socioeconomically, as they had seen Jews do successfully. For others
there was a desire to build social movements that could engage the wider
society, either with an Islamic message or to lobby on foreign policy issues. In
either case was there a strong connection with the African-American Muslim
experience.
Insofar as they had a political agenda, the national Islamic organizations that came
to prominence in the 1990s were concerned with campaigning in support of
Palestine-an activity that was increasingly in danger of being criminalized. The 1996
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act gave birth to the "material support
statute;' which became the basis for prosecution of Muslim Americans for
expressing an "ideology" and allowed government evidence to be heard in secret in
detention hearings and trials, effectively removing the right of defendants to
challenge the prosecution. It was a power used mainly against Arabs and Muslim
Americans. In the LAS case, the judge had refused to allow the government to
present evidence in secret; the 1996 act was designed to remedy that. Meanwhile,
the Democratic Party had deepened its ties with the pro-Israel lobby during the
1990s. In what is now a largely forgotten piece of pre-9/11 history, the major Islamic
organizations decided to respond to these trends by allying with the Republicans in
the 2000 elections, hoping that in return for American Muslim votes, the GOP would
be a vehicle for a more balanced Middle East foreign policy. In 1999, George W Bush
hosted meetings between Muslim and Republican leaders and visited an Islamic
center in Michigan. On the campaign trail he celebrated Americans who regularly
attend a "church, synagogue, or mosque:' And in one of his presidential debates

with Vice President Al Gore, Bush criticized the 1996 secret evidence legislation,
which President Clinton had signed into law. Conservative activist Grover Norquist
proclaimed in the American Spectator that "Bush was elected President of the
United States of America because of the Muslim vote. 47
After the heyday of the cold war, the pattern of immigration had shifted again:
Muslims coming to live in the US were now more likely to be seeking asylum, fleeing
conflict, joining family, or entering on H1B temporary work permits linked to
employment in information technology (IT) or engineering. A significant Muslim
population developed in northern Virginia based on the local tech industry. In the
western suburbs of Houston, Texas, Muslim immigrants came to take up jobs in the
energy sector. Somali refugees settled in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, and
Columbus, Ohio, beginning in the late 1980s, often facing severe unemployment in
their new homes. In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, refugees from Egypt and Lebanon who
arrived in the 1990s likewise struggled to live anything like the American Dream.
They were often at risk of raids by the immigration authorities and
disproportionately stopped and frisked on the subways.48
It was the more precariously situated refugee populations that bore the brunt of the
post-9/11 government crackdowns on Muslims in the US : the roundups of foreign
nationals, intensifying surveil lance, and racial profiling. The majority of American
Muslims-perhaps as many as 80 percent- do not attend mosques and have a secular
outlook. But irrespective of their own lack of belief in, affiliation with, or practice of
Islam, since 9/11 they have become "Muslim;' because others perceive them as
such.49 In his analysis of French anti-Semitism, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of a similar
process in which being Jewish was ultimately not based on a biological race or a
religious belief but on a social relationship: "The Jew is one whom other men
consider a Jew. Similarly, after 9/11, the experience of being Muslim was rooted
more in a social than a theological identity. Many suburban Muslims hoped that
the negative atmosphere after 9/11 would be temporary, and that, after it had
passed, they could return to their status as Asian model minorities or go back to
passing for white. In the meantime, the best strategy was thought to be excessive
displays of patriotism and declarations of loyalty to the American way. A 2011 Pew
survey of Muslim Americans found that 44 percent display the United States flag at
home, at the office, or on their car.51 To these more affluent Muslims, more
recently arrived working-class immigrants who had not assimilated were something
of an embarrassment, bringing what a Muslim businessman in Houston, Texas,
refers to as "a lot of baggage from back home'' such as "anti-American sentiment.
52
For the national organizations, the basic question raised by the new after-9/11
climate was whether to follow a strategy of declaring one's loyalty to America and
presenting Muslims as model citizens, or to instead move in the direction of
protests against the war on terror foreign policy and attacks on Muslims'
human rights in the US, particularly those of foreign nationals. Overwhelmingly,
the leadership chose the former path: they were ill equipped to do anything
else, given their own conservative outlooks. The traditions of civil rights organizing
that existed among African-American Muslims were an obvious resource, which by

and large was not drawn upon by the major Islamic organizations. Having generally
discounted the African-American experience from their idea of what it means to be
an American Muslim, it was hard for the national organizations to embrace it; and
while the activities of African-American Muslims might on occasion be seen by wider
society as un-American, their social being was not considered alien as such, and
their experience was therefore significantly different from that of Arabs and South
Asian Muslims after 9/11. Beginning in the 1990s, there had been some attempts to
unify African-American and immigrant Muslim experiences, as the former drew
closer to orthodox Sunni Islam and the latter grew accustomed to seeing
themselves within the framework of US multiculturalism The Muslim American
Society, for example, tried to bring the movement-building tradition of black civil
rights to US Muslims, arguing that organizing against the government on foreign
policy and civil rights issues was not disloyalty but a truer form of patriotism. It
launched a civic education program and voter registration drives and sought to
build coalitions with other minorities. But fear in the community was a major
barrier.53
Race proved at least as strong a factor as religion in shaping the experiences of US
Muslins in the period after 9/11. As Dawud Walid, an African-American Muslim
activist in Detroit, notes:
Arab Americans were right at the door of what's called "whiteness" in
America. Whiteness in America doesn't mean skin color. It's a level of
assimilation and social fluidity. Even on the census, Arabs are considered
white. But now socially they're not white anymore9/11 took away their
social white card. So some of these people want to do whatever they can do
to be accepted as white. To be accepted in the mainstream. Now, I'm black,
and we have a different history in this country. I've never desired to be white,
and it's impossible for me to be white. Hence, from us black Americans who
are Muslims, you will hear a different type of talk. And sometimes they think
that we're more like the angry black people. It's not that. It's just that I want a
dignified space for us in America. It's not my goal to be accepted by certain
people. And I don't have any fear of being deported. I'm coming from a totally
different psychological disposition.
While some were still hoping that the door to whiteness might in time open again,
for the moment, after 9/11 their treatment by the federal government reflected
their reracialization. Dawud added:
Even those people who have made itsuccessfully, financially, and
educationallytheir money won't stop them from getting handcuffed at the
Canadian border or being questioned by the FBI . I know people who are
millionaires who this has happened to. Even a political relationship with the
Bush administration didn't help them. One of the wealthiest Muslims in this
area, an Arab American, who is a big donor to the Republican Party and has
given a million dollars to the GOPit didn't stop him from getting handcuffed
when he flew back into the country.5
The Arab-American comedian Dean Obeidallah joked:

It's so weird. Before 9/11, I am just a white guy, living a typical white guy's
life. All my friends had names like Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Ross . . . I go
to bed September tenth white, wake up September eleventh, I am an Arab.
Despite the losses of civil liberties, the hate crimes, and the launching of wars
causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the Middle East and South Asia,
there was no mass-movement building among American-Muslim
communities to protest against the war on terror, as there had been to some
extent in the UK. Instead, most American Muslim organizations favored attempts at
behind-the scenes political lobbying and judicial activism. Even public statements
by Muslim organizations against the 2003 Iraq war were wrapped in declarations of
loyalty. The Muslim American Society on its Web site on March 27, 2003, stated:
Our opposition to some government policies does not diminish our love for
our country and our commitment to its security and prosperity. We strive to
serve its best interests by standing out firmly for justice at home and abroad,
and calling for meaningful reforms.
For young American Muslims growing up in the period after 9/11, the contradictions
were glaring. The excessive loyalty declarations inadvertently revealed how
insecure Muslims actually were in America. Youth worker Rachid Elabed explained
that before 9/11, young Muslim Americans in Dearborn were reaching the point
where they "felt like they're American. But that ended with the war on terror.
And they see all this stuff on TV, like the Peter King congressional hearing on
Muslim radicalization and the guy who wants to burn the Qur'an. They feel
like: What's up with this? Just because one Muslim does something bad,
doesn't mean all Muslims are bad. They love to be American, they love the
freedom, but things like this pull down their self-esteem. Deep down it hurts
them, but they don't show it. They don't feel like anything's going to
happen if they speak out, so they keep it to themselves.
Young Muslims outside the largely Arab neighborhood of Dearborn feel such
sentiments even more intensely. The dissonance between public patriotism and
private anger at what was happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine was
striking. Many middle-class Muslim professionals continued to genuinely believe in
the American Dream; others just felt they had to be careful what they said in public.
To many young Muslims, America's rhetoric of freedom began to ring hollow. At
school, those who seemed, from their color, dress, or name, to be Muslim-including
Sikhs, Hindus, and Christian Arabs-were often victimized. A 2009 survey revealed
that the majority of Sikh school students in the San Francisco Bay Area suffered
racial bullying or harassment. 56 (The Muslim terrorist is stereotypically depicted in
US popular culture with a turban, which is traditionally worn by Sikh men.)
For many young Muslims, the war on terror forced a rethinking of their identities as
Americans. Suhail Muzzafar, a Pakistani American who chairs a mosque on Staten
Island, New York, remembers:

On 9/11, all the schools in New York were locked down. Afterwards, I went to
pick up my eight-year-old daughter. She said: "Dad, our teachers told us
someone bombed the World Trade Center. We should go and bomb whoever
did this. She was thinking like a pure American. Like many other American
Muslims of her generation, she didn't know anything about Palestine or
Pakistan. However, when American-Muslim children returned to school after
9/11, they suddenly discovered they were being called "terrorists" and
"extremists:' Muslims came under suspicion, and their loyalty to America was
questioned. In the post-9/11 climate our kids were made to think of
themselves only in terms of their Muslim identity . Prior to 9/11 we identified
ourselves to each other based on ethnic and national identity-as Italian
Americans or Pakistani Americans, for example. After 9/11 we were identified
more by our religion, as American Muslims, and this was new to us. The older
generations of American Muslims generally did not react to this, but we
noticed our children often responded by highlighting their Muslim identity.
Young women began to wear hijab and young men wore Muslim caps in
public. By their dress code, they were saying, "You think I'm an extremist. OK,
I'll give you extremism:' On the other hand, others went the other way and
called themselves "Mo" instead of Mohammed.
As in the UK, one way that young Muslims have tried to reconcile these tensions is
by distancing themselves from the specific ethnic heritage of their immigrant
parents and identifying with the ummah. But such as identity is not easily
expressed publiclyin some quarters, it makes you a potential enemy of the
stateso many find online venues to explore who they are. Many, too, search for
answers to the question of what being an American Muslim might mean . Tariq
Ramadan's model is, for many, an attractive way of rethinking Islam for life as a
Muslim in the West, with its emphasis on individual interpretation, reconciling basic
values, and engaging the wider society in struggles for justice. 57 In various ways, a
new narrative is beginning to emerge among the younger generation, which starts
from the premise, I want my parents' religion but not their culture.58 Figures like
Suhaib Webb, imam of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, and Hamza
Yusuf, cofounder of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California, are at the forefront of
this movement to create an American-style Islam that combines Islamic principles
with US culture. At the 2007 ISNA annual convention, Yusuf argued not only that
Muslim and American values are aligned, but also that American Muslims are the
true inheritors of "old-fashioned American values" which have otherwise been
lost.59
Looking back in 2011 on ten years of Muslim activism that was mainly focused on
reassuring the mainstream, Khalilah Sabra of the Muslim American Society asked:
Did we affect those who have the power to act against the injustices that still
seem to have significant traction? I wonder if we did more than just fortify a
comfort zone . . . I cannot help but believe that many Muslims were more
apologetic than honest, hoping to avoid the appearance of being more
antagonistic than moderate. It's pretty common to disguise indignation with
moderation, because it offers an individual self-protection. Is there no escape

from this circular reasoning in which Muslims are urged to prove their loyalty
to the nation, and after presenting themselves as loyal, are then accused of
concealing their disloyalty?

Islamophobic policies mask the worst forms of ongoing

structural violence and you have an ethical duty to challenge
them.
We dont need to win spillover the characterization of
Muslims as inherently violent is pervasive in debate
scholarship and is used to sanitize mass Western violence
our scholarship exposes invasive state control and racism
Kundnani, 15Arun, Professor of Terror Studies and Media @ NYU & John Jay
College, formerly a Fellow @ Leiden U (Netherlands), an Open Society Fellow, and
Editor of Race and Class. The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and
the Domestic War on Terror, p. 21-25 BR
As scholars such as Eqbal Ahmad pointed out even before the war on terror, to
designate an act of violence as terrorism is to arbitrarily isolate it from other acts of
violence considered normal, rational, or necessary. The term "terrorism'' is never
used to refer to the military violence of Western states, or to the daily reality of
gender-based violence, for example, both of which ought also to be labeled
terrorism according to the term's usual definition: violence against innocent civilians
designed to advance a political cause (the maintenance of patriarchy is
eminently political). As such, each use of the term "terrorism" is an inherently
political act. The definition of terrorism is never applied consistently, because to do
so would mean the condemnatory power of the term would have to be applied to
our violence as much as theirs, thereby defeating the word's usefulness. 45
Ahmad's point finds no better illustration than Congressman Peter King, who today
rails against the radicalization of Muslim Americans but in the 1980s gave what
would now be called material support to the Irish Republican Army by encouraging
fund-raising among Irish Americans and telling a 1982 rally in Nassau County, New
York: "We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this
very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the
streets of Belfast and Derry. If the British army's presence in Northern Ireland in
the 1980s was imperialism, then presumably its more recent presence in
Afghanistan must also be so described.
If terrorism is defined as violence against innocent civilians designed to advance a
political cause, the Woolwich attack in London is properly described as an act of
terrorism. The victim was a combat ant, but he was not present on a battlefield, so
it is appropriate to describe him at that time as a civilian. However, by the same
definition, all the racist murders that occur in Britain and the US are also acts of
terrorism, because the perpetrators are trying to send a political message to

minority communities (i.e., intimidate them into a subordinate status). Like the
violent acts we normally think of as terrorism, racist violence not only takes the
lives of its immediate victims, but also sends a larger message of fear to the wider
population.47 Yet terrorism and racist violence are not considered to be equally
significant threats by governments and the establishment media echo chamber .
While the murder of Lee Rigby was a major national event, prompting a flurry of
government actions, policy responses, and public discussion, racist murders are
rarely reported beyond the local newspaper. This difference cannot be explained as
a matter of the scale of harm each form of violence inflicts. In Europe, the violence
carried out by far Right groups, which have racism as a central part of their
ideology, is of a similar magnitude to that of jihadist violence: at least 249 people
died in incidents of far Right violence between 1990 and 2012; 263 were killed by
jihadists over the same period.48 In the US, between 1990 and 2010, there were
145 acts of political violence committed by the American far Right, resulting in
348 deaths.49 In comparison, 20 people were killed over the same period in acts of
political violence carried out by Muslim-American citizens or long-term residents of
the US.50 Both categories of violence represent threats to democratic values from
fellow citizens. Whereas the former uses violence to foment a change in the ethnic
makeup of Western countries or to defend racial supremacy, the latter uses violence
to try to intimidate Western governments into changing their foreign policies.
Ultimately, to be more concerned about one domestic threat of violence rather than
the other implies governments and mainstream journalists consider foreign policies
more sacrosanct than the security of minority citizens.
The political act of labeling certain forms of violence as terrorism is also usually a
racialized act. This was revealed dearly in the hours after the attacks in Boston and
Woolwich, before the identities of the perpetrators were known. Speculation in the
US media as to whether the attacks were domestic or international terrorism used
those terms as codes to talk about whether the perpetrators were white (and
therefore assumed to be either crazed "lone wolves" or far Right "patriots") or
Muslim (and therefore to be understood as driven by the same alien ideology that
produced 9/11). When CNN's John King commented that the person arrested for
the Boston attack had been identified as a "dark-skinned man;' it was not just an
individual gaffe but the making explicit of the racial subtext to the entire discourse
of counterterrorism. 51 On MSNBC, Chris Matthews asked his terrorism expert
guests whether government analysts would be able to tell from the surveillance
images of the suspects if they were "from Yemen or other parts like that '52 The
suspect's face was being asked to reveal a racial identity that would, in turn, tell us
whether he was one of "them'' or one of "us and therefore what kind of emotional
response to the bombing would be appropriate. As it turned out, the suspects were
in every sense Caucasian.
In reporting the Woolwich murder, the BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson, made a
strikingly similar slip, describing one of the assailants as being of "Muslim
appearance:'53 The black man he was referring to was wearing jeans, a hoodie, and
a wooly hat; nevertheless his "Muslimness" had somehow become visible, thereby
justifying the use of the term "terrorist". A month earlier, another UK murder had

taken place that was barely noticed, let alone named as a terrorist act. Mohammed
Saleem, a seventy-five-year-old Muslim man from Birmingham, had been stabbed
three times in the back as he left his local mosque. Only later in July, when the
perpetrator was arrested and found to have also bombed two mosques in the weeks
after the Woolwich attack, did pressure from community activists force the police to
also describe his crimes as terrorism. 54 The default assumption remains that the
term "terrorist" is reserved for acts of political violence carried out by Muslims.
The events of 9/11, of course, stand out as the worst single day of nonstate
terrorism in the modern era. But the stream of similarly devastating a tacks that
security officials predicted in the years after 2001 has not materialized while the
basic mind-set of counterterror ism has not adjusted: its reflexes are much the same
as they were on September 12, 2001. Certainly there have been a handful of plots,
such as that of Najibullah Zazi in 2009, in which a terrorist act would likely have
occurred in the US were it not for the government's investigative efforts (although
the argument that successful investigations depended on warrantless surveillance
did not stand up to scrutiny).55 And a series of potentially devastating jihadist plots
have been detected in Britain. Of course, governments claim the absence of a
greater number of successful attacks is a result of their policy choices. But a closer
look at the actual arrests made by governments suggests a somewhat different
account. Those arrested for terrorist crimes bear scant resemblance to the popular
image of Muslim fanatics out to destroy Western civilization through spectacular
acts of violence. Of the 176 Muslims indicted or arrested for involvement in
terrorism in the US between 2001 and 2010, a significant number were prosecuted
not for violence but for "expressive" and charitable activities that the government
considers "material support" for terrorism-but which would likely have been
considered lawful before 9/11.56 Others are accused not of threatening violence in
the US but of traveling to other parts of the world to join local insurgencies. Most of
the remainder are individuals who have been convicted because agents
provocateurs spent months pressuring them to agree to participate in imaginary
plots they would never have been able to organize by themselves - in these cases,
the only radicalization taking place was that carried out by the FBI. To a large
degree the US government is fantasizing into existence the very threat of
domestic jihadism it claims it is fighting.
In dedicating tens of billions of dollars a year to fighting a domestic threat of
terrorist violence that is largely imagined, the US government has neglected the
challenge of creating a genuinely peaceful society.57 An ideologically driven focus
on Muslim Americans as the prime threat of violence goes hand in hand with a
normalization of the fact that in the US fifteen thousand people are murdered each
year.58 Indeed, the political scientist John Mueller has illustrated how our
conception of the terrorist threat is shaped more by ideology than objectivity. He
has calculated as follows: "In almost all years the total number of people worldwide
who die at the hands of international terrorists is not much more than the number
who drown in bathtubs in the United States:'59 In the United Kingdom, despite the
focus on al-Qaeda, the number of deaths caused by sectarianism in Northern Ireland
over the last decade is similar to the number of lives lost in jihadist attacks.

According to the University of Ulster, there were sixty-two deaths related to the
conflict in Northern Ireland between 2002 and 2011. There were fifty-three deaths
as a result of jihadist violence in the UK over the same period.60
Contrast those numbers with the loss of life in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan as a
result of the wars the US has fought since 9/ 11. Scholars at the Eisenhower
Research Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies
calculated in 2013 that those wars had led to the deaths of 270,000 people, the
most conservative of such estimates.61 A study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg
School of Public Health estimated that the Iraq war had led to 655,000 deaths as of
July 2006, before the worst period of violence.62 One of the key arguments of this
book is that to comprehend the causes of so-called jihadist terrorism we need to
pay as much attention to Western state violence, and the identity politics
that sustains it, as we do to Islamist ideology. What governments call extremism
is to a large degree a product of their own wars.

**Thus, we affirm that domestic surveillance of MuslimAmerican populations should be substantially curtailed.
The use of informants and agent provocateurs should be
eliminated.
The use of material support legislation to criminalize
charitable or expressive activities should cease.
The use of community engagement to gather intelligence
should end.

The popular conception of surveillance focuses on a series of

wires, but violence against minority and anti-racist political
activists goes deeper. Abdullahs death is the latest in a long
line of deadly uses of countersubversion through infiltration
this surveillance tactic has been used to disrupt challengers of
institutionalized racism since the rise of COINTELPRO.

The reading of the 1AC refuses the FBIs attempt to silence

dissent against American empire and opens up genuinely
radical political alternatives by challenging institutional racism
Kundnani, 15Arun, Professor of Terror Studies and Media @ NYU & John Jay
College, formerly a Fellow @ Leiden U (Netherlands), an Open Society Fellow, and
Editor of Race and Class. The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and
the Domestic War on Terror, p. 10-15 BR
Two main modes of thinking pervade the war on terror, one predominantly among
conservatives, the other among liberals. The first mode locates the origins of
terrorism in what is regarded as Islamic culture's failure to adapt to modernity. The
second identifies the roots of terrorism not in Islam itself but in a series of
twentieth century ideologues who distorted the religion to produce a totalitarian
ideology-Islamism- on the models of communism and fascism. The problem with
both of these approaches is that they eschew the role of social and political
circumstances in shaping how people make sense of the world and then act upon it.
Moreover, these modes of thinking are not free-floating. They are institutionalized in
the war on terror's practices, actively promoted by well-resourced groups, and
ultimately reflect an imperialist political culture. Together they give rise to the belief
that the root cause of terrorism is Islamic culture or Islamist ideology; they thus
constitute an Islamophobic idea of a Muslim problem that is shared across the
political spectrum. As a result, a key aspect of national security policy has been the
desire to engineer a broad cultural shift among Western Muslims while ignoring the
ways in which Western states themselves have radicalized- have become more
willing to use violence in a wider range of contexts.
Islamophobia is sometimes seen as a virus of hatred recurring in Western culture
since the Crusades. Others view it as a spontaneous reaction to terrorism that will
pass away as the effects of 9/11 recede into history. Many believe it does not exist.
My emphasis is on Islamophobia as a form of structural racism directed at Muslims
and the ways in which it is sustained through a symbiotic relationship with the
official thinking and practices of the war on terror. Its significance does not lie
primarily in the individual prejudices it generates but in its wider political
consequencesits enabling of systematic violations of the rights of Muslims and
its demonization of actions taken to remedy those violations. The war on terror
with its vast death tolls in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and
elsewherecould not be sustained without the racialized dehumanization of
its Muslim victims. A social body dependent on imperialist violence to sustain its
way of life must discover an ideology that can disavow that dependency if it is to
maintain legitimacy. Various kinds of racism have performed that role in the modern
era; Islamophobia is currently the preferred form. The usual objection to defining it
in this way is that Muslims are not a race. But since all racisms are socially and
politically constructed rather than reliant on the reality of any biological race, it is
perfectly possible for cultural markers associated with Muslimness (forms of dress,
rituals, languages, etc.) to be turned into racial signifiers.20 This racialization of
Muslimness is analogous in important ways to anti-Semitism and inseparable from
the longer history of racisms in the US and the UK. To recognize this obviously does

not imply that critiques of Islamic belief are automatically to be condemned as

racially motivated; it does mean opposing the social and political processes by
which antipathy to Islam is acted out in violent attacks on the street or
institutionalized in state structures such as profiling, violations of civil rights, and so
on.21
The academic and official models of radicalization that have been central to the
domestic war on terror have emerged within what the US and UK governments call
a preventive approach to counterterrorism, in which an attempt is made to identify
individuals who are not terrorists now but might be at some later date. But how do
you identify tomorrow's terrorists today? That was also the implied question posed
by Steven Spielberg's 2002 film, Minority Report, in which a specialist PreCrime Unit
uses three psychics called PreCogs to predict who will be murderers in the future.
The unit is then able to arrest precriminals before they have committed the crimes
for which they are convicted. Likewise, a preventive approach to the war on terror
would need its own PreCogs' capability to identify the terrorists of the future. To
meet this need, security officials turned to academic models that claim scientific
knowledge of a process by which ordinary Muslims become terrorists; they then
inferred the behavioral, cultural, and ideological signals that they think can reveal
who is at risk of turning into a terrorist at some point in the future. In the FBl's
model, what they call "jihadist" ideology is taken to be the driver that turns young
men and women into terrorists. They pass through four stages: preradicalization,
identification, indoctrination, and action. In the second stage, growing a beard,
starting to wear traditional Islamic clothing, and becoming alienated from one's
former life are listed as indicators; "increased activity in a pro- Muslim social group
or political cause" is a sign of stage three, one level away from becoming an active
terrorist.22 Only the last stage in this model involves criminal conduct but, as a New
York Police Department (NYPD) paper on radicalization put it, the challenge is "how
to identify, pre-empt and thus prevent homegrown terrorist attacks given the noncriminal element of its indicators:'23 What this implies is that terrorism can only be
prevented by systematically monitoring Muslim religious and political life and trying
to detect the radicalization indicators predicted by the model. Sharing an ideology
with terrorists is thus considered a PreCrime, a stage in the radicalization process.
"The threat isn't really from al-Qaeda central;' explained former FBI assistant
director John Miller, "as much as it's from al-Qaeda-ism:'24 Deciding that al-Qaedaism-an ideological construct devised by the FBI-is a threat means that radicals who
do not espouse violence but whose ideas can be superficially associated with alQaeda, such as Imam Luqman, come to be seen as would-be terrorists. In Minority
Report, the PreCrime Unit is eventually shut down when the fallibility of the PreCogs
is exposed. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies continue to rely upon
radicalization models with no predictive power in order to shape policies of
surveillance, infiltration, and entrapment.
The consequences of making the notion of radicalization central to the domestic war
on terror are far-reaching. When the government widened the perceived threat of
terrorism from individuals actively inciting, financing, or preparing terrorist attacks
to those having an ideology, they brought constitutionally protected activities of

large numbers of people under surveillance. Most discussion of state

surveillance attends to wiretapping, collection of Internet communications data ,
closed-circuit television cameras, and other forms of electronic surveillance of our
online and offline lives. Edward Snowden's whistle-blowing has made clear the
extent to which the US National Security Agency conducts warrantless surveillance
of Internet and phone communication globally and domestically.25 But central to
counterradicalization practice is another form of surveillance that is
addressed less often: using personal relationships within targeted communities
themselves for intelligence gathering. When community organizations and service
providers such as teachers, doctors, and youth workers develop surveillance
relationships with law enforcement agencies, when government community
engagement exercises mask intelligence gathering, and when informants are
recruited from communities, surveillance becomes intertwined with the fabric of
human relation ships and the threads of trust upon which they are built. The power
and danger of these forms of surveillance derive from their entanglement in
everyday human interactions at the community level rather than from the external
monitoring capabilities of hidden technologies. Moreover, having established such
structures of surveillance in relation to Islamist extremism, it becomes easy to
widen them to other forms of radicalism- occasionally to cover the far Right, but
more often to left-wing protesters and dissidents. Following from the widening of
surveillance is the criminalization of ideological activities previously understood to
be constitutionally protected. This can happen through the entrapment of
individuals by law enforcement agencies or through measures criminalizing the
material support of terrorism, the definition of which has been widened to include a
broad range of ideological activities. Then, because ideologies circulating among
Muslim populations have been identified as precursors to terrorism, the perception
grows that Muslims have a special problem with radicalization. In this context,
leaders of targeted Muslim communities have become intimidated by the general
mood and aligned themselves with the government , offering themselves as allies
willing to oppose and expose dissent within the community. Everyone who rejects
the game of fake patriotism falls under suspicion, as opposition to extremism
becomes the only legitimate discourse . Finally, the spectacle of the Muslim
extremist renders invisible the violence of the US empire. Opposition to
such violence from within the imperium has fallen silent , as the universal
duty of countering extremism precludes any wider discussion of foreign policy.26
The planting of informants and agents provocateurs among networks of political
radicals is a practice dating back at least 125 years , to the Russian tsar's secret
police, the Okhrana, and the early special branch at Scotland Yard. Lightly regulated
intelligence services have long used techniques of provocation to disrupt political
opposition, spread misinformation, and engineer violent crimes that would
otherwise not have happened, thereby securing the conviction of dissidents. This
was the countersubversion model the FBI's COINTELPRO initiative drew on in its
sustained and coordinated campaign to thwart constitutionally protected activism
and counteract political dissent during the 1960s. Targets included the civil rights,
black liberation, Puerto Rican independence, antiwar, and student movements. In an
attempt to neutralize Martin Luther King Jr., who, the FBI worried, might abandon his

"obedience to white liberal doctrines;' he was placed under intense surveillance,

and attempts were made to destroy his marriage and induce his suicide. The Black
Panther Party was disrupted in various cities by using fake letters and informants to
stir up violence between rival factions and gangs.27 The congressional hearings
initiated by Senator Frank Church in 1975 to examine the intelligence agencies
concluded that the FBI's activities
would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had
been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that. The
unexpressed major premise of the program was that a law enforcement
agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats
to the existing social and political order.28
Those at the agency behind the initiative were never brought to justice for their
activities, and similar techniques continued to be used in the 1980s against, for
example, the American Indian Movement and the Committee in Solidarity with the
People of El Salvador.29
In recent years, the US domestic national security apparatus has effectively
revived the countersubversion practices of COINTELPRO. Campaign groups
such as the Bill of Rights Defense Committee have dubbed "COINTELPRO 2.0"
tactics that amount to a twenty first-century countersubversion strategy: the
extensive surveillance of Muslim-American populations; the deployment of
informants; the use of agents provocateurs; the widening use of material support
legislation to criminalize charitable or expressive activities; and the use of
community engagement to gather intelligence and effect ideological self-policing of
communities. Significantly, such practices have been encouraged, organized, and
legitimized by the radicalization models that law enforcement agencies adopted in
the first decade of the twenty-first century. Yet radicalizationin the truest
sense of the wordis the solution, not the problem. Al-Qaeda's violent
vanguardism thrives in contexts where politics has been brutally suppressed or
blandly gentrified. Opening up genuinely radical political alternatives and
reviving the political freedoms that have been lost in recent years is the
best approach to reducing so-called jihadist terrorism.

1ac w USFG
Domestic surveillance is a militarized, extrajudicial tool used to
target Muslims and black people birthed from COINTELPRO. We
begin by telling the brief story of Luqman Abdullah, a Muslim
imam and community activist who served thousands while
renouncing violence. His peaceful community service couldnt
save himhe was unfinished business from COINTELPRO and
was surveilled, infiltrated and assassinated by federal agents
because he dared to challenge violent racial oppression.
Kundnani, 15Arun, Professor of Terror Studies and Media @ NYU & John Jay
College, formerly a Fellow @ Leiden U (Netherlands), an Open Society Fellow, and
Editor of Race and Class. The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and
the Domestic War on Terror, p. 1-5 BR
Death came instantly to Imam Luqman, as four FBI agents fired semiautomatic rifles
from a few feet away. Sixty law enforcement officers-including a special operations
team the FBI had flown in from Quantico, Virginia, a SWAT team from the FBI's
Detroit field office, and officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police-had
surrounded the warehouse in Dearborn, Michigan, where the imam and his four
colleagues were loading television sets into a trailer on the morning of October 28,
2009. Luqman Abdullah had been the leader of the Al-Haqq Mosque on Detroit's
impoverished West Side for thirty years . Every Sunday he and his followers had run
a soup kitchen, providing some of the basic needs of the local community. The
majority of the people in the neighborhood were either unemployed or in low-paying
jobs, and they depended on such initiatives for their survival. The landscape of
mostly empty and burned-out buildings was testimony to the exodus of huge
swathes of the city's population and the practice of families sharing houses when
they could no longer afford the rent on their own homes. Imam Luqman was a
familiar face, always available to help out Muslim and non-Muslim alike. His favorite
word was "grassroots, says his son Omar Regan.He had a strong desire to change
the neighborhood. He believed that Islam would help people get off drugs, alcohol,
and depression. But he wouldn't even really preach for them to be Muslim more
than he would push for them to at least act like they were Muslim. He'd just give it
to you real. Everybody always talked to him, because they appreciated his direct
approach. He believed we got to change the condition of our people, because the
government ain't going to do it. And he would say we need to stand up and fight for
our rights, because the government's pushing us around, trying to make us feel like
we got something to do with 9/11 when we ain't got nothing to do with that kind of
stuff. That's how my dad would talkhe's from back in the sixties.1 Luqman
Abdullah had converted to Islam in the early 1980s, after serving in the military and
then falling into depression. The inspiration for his conversion was Jamil al-Amin,
who in the 1960s, under the name of H. Rap Brown, had been a leading activist with
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Over the course of a
decade, in the face of racist violence and the Democratic Party's sluggish response
to the organization's attempts to break southern segregation, SNCC had radicalized;

it came to advocate black power and opposition to the Vietnam war, and eventually
merged with the Black Panther Party. Rap Brown rose to the top of the FBI's target
list of black revolutionaries, and soon enough, the bureau found its opportunity to
imprison him-on incitement to riot charges. Brown converted to orthodox Islam
while in prison in New York in 1971 for reasons no doubt similar to those which led
Luqman Abdullah to do the same a decade later. For both, Islam preached active
struggle for racial justice alongside individual spiritual development; it offered a way
to live and a vision of a better life. This interpretation of Islam offered a framework
for continuing the black radical tradition of the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X
after a period of defeat for black political struggle. The FBl's Counterintelligence
Program (known as COINTELPRO) had secretly destabilized the movement and
entrapped its activists. Brown, now calling himself Jamil al-Amin, was released
from prison in 1976 and settled in Atlanta, Georgia. He opened a community
grocery store and helped rid the neighborhood of drugs. But he continued to face
regular law enforcement harassment and arbitrary arrests. Eventually, in 2000, alAmin was arrested on murder charges after a shootout with two Fulton County
Sheriff 's deputies occurred. Al-Amin was identified by the surviving officer as the
shooter who had been wounded in the exchange of gunfire-even though he had no
injuries and another person had confessed to the crime. He is now caged in the
"domestic Guantanamo;' the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, where the US
government incarcerates those it accuses of being among the most dangerous alQaeda terrorists. By the time the war on terror was launched in 2001 much of the
sixties generation of black radical activists had been exhausted, co-opted,
imprisoned, or killed, to a large degree victims of the FBI's efforts to destroy the
movement. But Luqman Abdullah, who was leading the campaign to free Jamil alAmin, was still preaching radicalism to his small congregation in Detroit. As Omar
Regan puts it, he was "unfinished business" from the days of COINTELPRO. And now
the war on terror provided a new lens through which to view his activities. Soon the
FBI was categorizing Abdullah as a "highly placed leader of a nationwide radical fundamentalist Sunni group consisting primarily
of African-Americans" who had called his followers to "an offensive jihad, rather than a defensive jihad [in order] to establish a separate, sovereign Islamic
state . . . within the borders of the United States, governed by Shariah law:'2 The implication was that he shared an ideology with al-Qaeda. In the sixties,
figures such as Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali had been portrayed by the media as "Muslim extremists"; now a new set of images of Islamic extremism
had come to the fore, images that could be used to manufacture an ideological connection between a radical black preacher on Detroit's West Side and
the events of September 11, 2001. In 2007, the FBI found its opportunity to begin targeting Imam Luqman's mosque. A member of the congregation had
recently been arrested on murder charges, and in a deal with law enforcement, he agreed to work with the counterterrorism squad of the FBI's Detroit field
office as part of a sting operation. Two other informants were also recruited, and a two-year undercover operation to infiltrate the mosque began. Many of
the congregants had criminal records; all were struggling with poverty. The offer of an FBI payout was bound to be tempting. And when the FBI
implemented its plan to lure those around Imam Luqman into helping fence stolen goods, it is easy to see how some of them were drawn in. The FBI's
informants pretended they had a contact who needed help moving merchandise stolen from trucking companies. Just for turning up to discuss the plan,
the contact, played by an FBI agent, gave everyone one hundred dollars. The second time they met, the FBI undercover agent paid one thou sand dollars
to the group before anything had even happened, and promised another fifteen hundred dollar payment the following night. All they had to do was turn
up at a warehouse in Dearborn and help move what they thought were stolen television sets and laptops from one semitrailer to another. This was
repeated a number of times over the coming months, gradually drawing Imam Luqman himself into the operation so that he would also be present at the

indictment was issued against Imam Luqman the

day before the raid in October 2009 that charged him with conspiracy to sell stolen
goods transported in interstate commerce, firearms possession violations, and
alterations to a vehicle identification number. No terrorism-related charges were
included, despite the involvement of the FBI's counterterrorism squad and the
multiagency Joint Terrorism Task Force. But the indictment included claims, based on
reports by the FBI-paid infiltrators, of conversations in which Imam Luqman had
advocated "the spread of Islam through violent jihad, and violence against the
United States government and against law enforcement:'3 These claims were never
tested in court, since Iman Luqman was dead, and none of these conversations
FBI's warehouse when the time came to carry out the raid.An

were taped. In one of the few conversations that was recorded by an informant,
Imam Luqman was asked to donate money for someone to "do something" during
the Super Bowl in Detroit. But he replied that he would not be involved in
injuring innocent people. There seems little doubt that Imam Luqman viewed the
US government as an oppressor and called on his followers to organize against it.
Like the Black Panther Party, members of the mosque also carried guns. But there
was no evidence of any plot to carry out a terrorist attack, just small time hustlers in an
impoverished neighborhood struggling to pay the bills while denouncing America. As Abdullah Bey elAmin, another African-American imam from the same neighborhood and a friend of Imam Luqman, put
it, the radical talk was no more than selling wolf tickets"street-corner bragging. "You don't need all
these crack-shot FBI and helicopters for somebody stealing a laptop:'4 Andrew Arena, the special
agent in charge of the FBI's Detroit field office, maintains that Imam Luqman was "the leader of a
domestic terrorist group. When asked why no terrorism charges were brought, he replied: Theres a
lot of cases where we don't charge a person with terrorism. We charge them with whatever we can, to
get them off the streets. With no evidence of terrorism strong enough to hold up in a court, some
other charge had to be concocted. But at the same time, in order to justify a sting operation on this
scale, journalists were told that the mosque was a hotbed of violent fundamentalists. It proved easier
to convict the imam of terrorism in the court of public opinion than in a court of law. When the
time came to finally spring their trap, the FBI's informants once again lured Imam Luqman to the
Dearborn warehouse. At a prearranged time, the three informants exited the warehouse and
explosives were let off inside as a distraction. A dozen federal agents approached Imam Luqman and
his colleagues and commanded them to get down and show their hands. His four associates complied,
but Imam Luqman delayed for a moment. Accounts of what happened next differ. Most likely
suspecting that Imam Luqman was hiding a gun, the agents released a dog trained to grab an arm
and, as the dog bit at his face, Imam Luqman fired at its chest, prompting return fire from four of the
agents, who were positioned nearby, killing him instantly. While an agent handcuffed his body as it lay
motionless on the warehouse floor, the police dog was evacuated by helicopter to a hospital for
possible life-saving treatment. The federal agents commented later that in the seconds before they
opened fire, Imam Luqman was looking directly at them and did not appear to be afraid.6 A thousand
people attended the four-mile procession to Imam Luqman's funeral. The Department of Justice
exonerated the FBI's handling of the arrest and declared his killing lawful. But there is little doubt that
had the government chosen not to infiltrate his mosque and entrap him in a criminal conspiracy of its
own invention, he would still be alive. The killing of Imam Luqman barely registered

in the news media. From one point of view, the manner of his death was hardly
different from dozens of other killings of African Americans each year at the hands
of militarized law enforcement agencies.7 From another perspective, he resembled
the thousands of unnamed militants killed by drones in Pakistan, Somalia, and
Yemen. Whether as an "Islamic extremist" or as an African American, his death
was a perfectly normal occurrence. If the war on terror was the stuff of highprofile debates about war, torture, and surveillance in the Bush years, under
President Obama it became a matter of bureaucratic routine, undramatic and
unopposed. Although Obama was elected on a wave of opposition to Bush's war on terror, he then failed to
take the US in a fundamentally different direction; the administration thereby effectively neutered any remaining
opposition and made permanent what had been a "state of emergency:' The minor shifts that did occur were largely
already in train in the closing years of the Bush administration. Obama continued along the same track with the
same aim in mind: to find ways to continue projecting force in the Middle East and to maintain a national security
state at home-but without the noisy and divisive political conflicts that had plagued Bush from 2003 onward.
Thus, the US military occupation of Iraq was wound down while the war in Afghanistan, where the number of US
troops was trebled, was presented as the "good war:' The number of prisoners at Guantanamo was decreased by
around a third, but the 171 who remained were slated for indefinite detention in what was now a permanent
internment camp. Speaking in Cairo in 2009, Obama attempted to draw a line through the clash of civilizations
imagery of the post-9/11 period and offered instead a picture of respectful dialogue between cultures. But he did so
without offering any of the changes in US foreign policy that would give such rhetoric substance. The PATRIOT Act
was renewed and the state secrets doctrine was invoked to protect Bush-era officials from prosecution for their
torture policy. Extraordinary rendition was wound down, while extrajudicial killings were stepped up.8 The American

Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called it the "new normal:'9 The very banality of counterterrorism discourse secured its
ideological power much more effectively than the confrontational rewriting-the-rules strategy of the Bush years.
Neoconservatives invented the terror war, but Obama liberalism normalized it, at which point, mainstream

What should, by any objective measure, have been the

moment the war on terror finally ended actually marked its entry into banality . The
killing of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011,just a few months before the ten-year
anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, came as uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were
providing a practical refutation of al-Qaeda's argument that violence against
Western civilians was the only way to defeat the near enemy of autocratic regimes
in the Middle East. Yet the terror war did not end. The chants of "U-S-A on the streets of
journalists stopped asking questions.

New York and Washington, led by Democrats happy that their president now had his own narrative of
conquest, captured the mood. What was being celebrated was a victory in a continuing war rather than
the outbreak of peace. There was little chance that this would be a moment to remember the hundreds
of thousands killed around the world as a result of the conflict between al-Qaeda and Western
governments. On that Sunday night, hours after bin Laden's death, CNN's resident terrorism expert,
Peter Bergen, announced that it would mean the end of the war on terror. By Monday morning, after
Hillary Clinton had said "the fight continues;' he was back on to correct his earlier assessment, echoing
the official line: there could be no end to the war.10 A war that from the beginning had no clear limits
or objectives could not now be concluded with the death of one man. The Authorization for Use of
Military Force Against Terrorists, passed by Congress three days after 9/11, established the war on
terror paradigm of an open-ended, perpetual, global war. Today the Obama administration continues to
rely on that authorization for the claim that it has a legal basis to carry out extrajudicial killings without
geographical limit.11 The enemy had come to be understood as more than a single individual or
organization; it was a set of ideas-radical Islam-that was defined vaguely enough that even the death
of bin Laden would not halt the hundreds of billions of dollars in spending the war involved. Thus, the
national security pundits warned, even greater dangers lurked at this very moment of apparent victory.
The same terrorism experts who with the death of bin Laden pronounced the near elimination of what
they called "core al-Qaeda" in Pakistan and Afghanistan also heralded new threats of Muslim
radicalization in other parts of the world: Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Europe, and in the US itself. If the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had been justified on the grounds that fighting them "over there" was the
best way to prevent attacks "over here;' a new phase of the war on terror under President Obama
intensified the fear that Western Muslim citizens were also a threat.

In August 2011, the White House published its new strategy to prevent violent
extremism within the US, which for the first time referred to the need to combat the
circulation of extremist ideology among American Muslims. 12 The following month
the US government used Predator drones to kill two American citizens in YemenAnwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. Security officials described the two as
"radicalizers" who had pioneered the use of the Internet to influence Western
Muslims. 13 It was the first time the US government had openly ordered the
extrajudicial killing of its own citizens. In another drone attack three weeks later, al-Awlaki's
sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman, was killed, along with his teenage cousin and at least five other civilians.14
Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, then a senior adviser to Obama's reelection campaign,
was asked by journalists about the killing; he said Abdulrahman should have had "a far more responsible father:'15
Congress began to consider the National Defense Authorization Act at the same time, which would not only lead to
Guantanamo being kept open indefinitely but also codify the indefinite military detention without trial of American
citizens arrested on US soil. President Obama declined to veto the act. The common theme in these developments
was the focus of the war on terror on the domestic front: the enemy now existed as much among our fellow citizens
as in foreign lands. The government was no longer imagining the threat as foreign terrorist sleepers living among
ordinary American Muslims; now it was the radicalization of ordinary American Muslims themselves that it feared.
Polling carried out after bin Laden's killing suggested that Americans were more anxious about Muslim Americans
being terrorists than they had been before. 16

Luqman Abdullahs story reveals that Islamophobic policies

mask the worst forms of ongoing structural violenceThe
characterization of Muslims as inherently violent is used to
excuse mass Western violencechallenging it independently
exposes the structural violence of invasive state control and
racism
Kundnani, 15Arun, Professor of Terror Studies and Media @ NYU & John Jay
College, formerly a Fellow @ Leiden U (Netherlands), an Open Society Fellow, and
Editor of Race and Class. The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and
the Domestic War on Terror, p. 21-25 BR
As scholars such as Eqbal Ahmad pointed out even before the war on terror, to
designate an act of violence as terrorism is to arbitrarily isolate it from other acts of
violence considered normal, rational, or necessary. The term "terrorism'' is never
used to refer to the military violence of Western states, or to the daily reality of
gender-based violence, for example, both of which ought also to be labeled
terrorism according to the term's usual definition: violence against innocent civilians
designed to advance a political cause (the maintenance of patriarchy is
eminently political). As such, each use of the term "terrorism" is an inherently political act. The definition of terrorism is
never applied consistently, because to do so would mean the condemnatory power of the term would have to be applied to our
violence as much as theirs, thereby defeating the word's usefulness. 45 Ahmad's point finds no better illustration than Congressman
Peter King, who today rails against the radicalization of Muslim Americans but in the 1980s gave what would now be called material
support to the Irish Republican Army by encouraging fund-raising among Irish Americans and telling a 1982 rally in Nassau County,
New York: "We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle
against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry. If the British army's presence in Northern Ireland in the 1980s was
imperialism, then presumably its more recent presence in Afghanistan must also be so described. If terrorism is defined as violence
against innocent civilians designed to advance a political cause, the Woolwich attack in London is properly described as an act of
terrorism. The victim was a combat ant, but he was not present on a battlefield, so it is appropriate to describe him at that time as a
civilian. However, by the same definition,

all the racist murders that occur in Britain and the US are
also acts of terrorism, because the perpetrators are trying to send a political
message to minority communities (i.e., intimidate them into a subordinate status).
Like the violent acts we normally think of as terrorism, racist violence not only takes
the lives of its immediate victims, but also sends a larger message of fear to the
wider population.47 Yet terrorism and racist violence are not considered to be
equally significant threats by governments and the establishment media echo
chamber. While the murder of Lee Rigby was a major national event, prompting a
flurry of government actions, policy responses, and public discussion, racist murders
are rarely reported beyond the local newspaper. This difference cannot be explained
as a matter of the scale of harm each form of violence inflicts. In Europe, the violence carried out by far Right
groups, which have racism as a central part of their ideology, is of a similar magnitude to that of jihadist violence: at least 249 people died in incidents of far Right violence between
1990 and 2012; 263 were killed by jihadists over the same period.48 In the US, between 1990 and 2010, there were 145 acts of political violence committed by the American far
Right, resulting in 348 deaths.49 In comparison, 20 people were killed over the same period in acts of political violence carried out by Muslim-American citizens or long-term residents of
the US.50 Both categories of violence represent threats to democratic values from fellow citizens. Whereas the former uses violence to foment a change in the ethnic makeup of
Western countries or to defend racial supremacy, the latter uses violence to try to intimidate Western governments into changing their foreign policies. Ultimately, to be more concerned
about one domestic threat of violence rather than the other implies governments and mainstream journalists consider foreign policies more sacrosanct than the security of minority

.The political act of labeling certain forms of violence as terrorism is also usually
a racialized act. This was revealed dearly in the hours after the attacks in Boston
and Woolwich, before the identities of the perpetrators were known. Speculation in the US media as to
citizens

whether the attacks were domestic or international terrorism used those terms as codes to talk about whether the perpetrators were white (and therefore assumed to be either crazed
"lone wolves" or far Right "patriots") or Muslim (and therefore to be understood as driven by the same alien ideology that produced 9/11). When CNN's John King commented that the
person arrested for the Boston attack had been identified as a "dark-skinned man;' it was not just an individual gaffe but the making explicit of the racial subtext to the entire discourse
of counterterrorism. 51 On MSNBC, Chris Matthews asked his terrorism expert guests whether government analysts would be able to tell from the surveillance images of the suspects if
they were "from Yemen or other parts like that '52 The suspect's face was being asked to reveal a racial identity that would, in turn, tell us whether he was one of "them'' or one of "us
and therefore what kind of emotional response to the bombing would be appropriate. As it turned out, the suspects were in every sense Caucasian.In reporting the Woolwich murder, the
BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson, made a strikingly similar slip, describing one of the assailants as being of "Muslim appearance:'53 The black man he was referring to was wearing
jeans, a hoodie, and a wooly hat; nevertheless his "Muslimness" had somehow become visible, thereby justifying the use of the term "terrorist". A month earlier, another UK murder had
taken place that was barely noticed, let alone named as a terrorist act. Mohammed Saleem, a seventy-five-year-old Muslim man from Birmingham, had been stabbed three times in the
back as he left his local mosque. Only later in July, when the perpetrator was arrested and found to have also bombed two mosques in the weeks after the Woolwich attack, did pressure

from community activists force the police to also describe his crimes as terrorism. 54 The default assumption remains that the term "terrorist" is reserved for acts of political violence
carried out by Muslims.The events of 9/11, of course, stand out as the worst single day of nonstate terrorism in the modern era. But the stream of similarly devastating a tacks that
security officials predicted in the years after 2001 has not materialized while the basic mind-set of counterterror ism has not adjusted: its reflexes are much the same as they were on
September 12, 2001. Certainly there have been a handful of plots, such as that of Najibullah Zazi in 2009, in which a terrorist act would likely have occurred in the US were it not for the
government's investigative efforts (although the argument that successful investigations depended on warrantless surveillance did not stand up to scrutiny).55 And a series of potentially
devastating jihadist plots have been detected in Britain. Of course, governments claim the absence of a greater number of successful attacks is a result of their policy choices. But a

. Those arrested for terrorist crimes bear

scant resemblance to the popular image of Muslim fanatics out to destroy Western
civilization through spectacular acts of violence. Of the 176 Muslims indicted or
arrested for involvement in terrorism in the US between 2001 and 2010, a
significant number were prosecuted not for violence but for "expressive" and
charitable activities that the government considers "material support" for terrorism but which would likely have been considered lawful before 9/11.56 Others are
accused not of threatening violence in the US but of traveling to other parts of the
world to join local insurgencies. Most of the remainder are individuals who have
been convicted because agents provocateurs spent months pressuring them to
agree to participate in imaginary plots they would never have been able to organize
by themselves- in these cases, the only radicalization taking place was that carried
out by the FBI. To a large degree the US government is fantasizing into
existence the very threat of domestic jihadism it claims it is fighting.In
dedicating tens of billions of dollars a year to fighting a domestic threat of terrorist
violence that is largely imagined, the US government has neglected the challenge of
creating a genuinely peaceful society.57 An ideologically driven focus on Muslim
Americans as the prime threat of violence goes hand in hand with a normalization of
the fact that in the US fifteen thousand people are murdered each year.58 Indeed,
the political scientist John Mueller has illustrated how our conception of the terrorist
threat is shaped more by ideology than objectivity. He has calculated as follows: "In
almost all years the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of
international terrorists is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in
the United States:'59 In the United Kingdom, despite the focus on al-Qaeda, the number of deaths caused by sectarianism
closer look at the actual arrests made by governments suggests a somewhat different account

in Northern Ireland over the last decade is similar to the number of lives lost in jihadist attacks. According to the University of Ulster,
there were sixty-two deaths related to the conflict in Northern Ireland between 2002 and 2011. There were fifty-three deaths as a
result of jihadist violence in the UK over the same period.60Contrast those numbers with the loss of life in Afghanistan, Iraq and
Pakistan as a result of the wars the US has fought since 9/ 11. Scholars at the Eisenhower Research Project at Brown University's
Watson Institute for International Studies calculated in 2013 that those wars had led to the deaths of 270,000 people, the most
conservative of such estimates.61 A study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated that the Iraq war had

to
comprehend the causes of so-called jihadist terrorism we need to pay as much
attention to Western state violence, and the identity politics that sustains
it, as we do to Islamist ideology. What governments call extremism is to a large
degree a product of their own wars.
led to 655,000 deaths as of July 2006, before the worst period of violence.62 One of the key arguments of this book is that

Islamophobia shapes US imperialist foreign policynotions of

western superiority are a critical tool to drum up support for
militaristic and elitist interventions, creating a global order of
inequality and destructiveness.
Kumar 13
[09/11/13, Deepa Kumar is an Associate Professor of Media Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at the Rutgers
University. She is the author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire and Outside the Box: Corporate Media,
Globalization, and the UPS Strike being interviewed by Jessica Desvarieux, The Real News Network, Twelve Years
Post 9/11, Islamophobia Still Runs High, http://truth-out.org/video/item/18759-twelve-years-post-9-11islamophobia-still-runs-high]

KUMAR: Absolutely not. I think it is true that larger numbers of conservative voters are racist .
They are racist not just in terms of their attitude towards Arabs and South Asians, but also to a whole host of other

Islamophobia is far
more systemic than that. That is to say, the idea of a Muslim enemy, the idea of a
terrorist enemy is one that actually goes back a couple of decades but was brought
to light after 9/11 by the political elite, by our political leaders. So in fact it is built into the
system of U.S. foreign policy in this country. And to simply look at the far right
and to ignore the fact that it has larger implications in terms of justifying U.S.
foreign policy would be really to have only an incomplete picture of what is at work
in this form of racism. DESVARIEUX: Okay. Let's talk about the mass media and how they depict Islam since
9/11. Can you describe for us how the mass media has depicted Islam? KUMAR: Well, basically, the trauma of
9/11, the fact that, you know, 3,000 Americans died meant that it enabled the U.S. media to actually
draw on stereotypes that have been, you know, propped up by Hollywood, by the news
media, and so on for a few decades before that. And that was the idea that these are
crazy, irrational people. They are all apparently driven by Islam to violence . And so
we should lock them up, we should be suspicious of them, we should detain them at
airports, and so on and so forth. And so that's what you saw in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. And
this show called 24, which your viewers may know, is-- it's about a lot of things [incompr.] that it's about
justifying the building of a national security state and justifying practices
like torture and so on and so forth. DESVARIEUX: Okay. And also the story of the day, of course, is
groups. So it's true that this idea sort of concentrated within those ranks. But in fact

Syria, and everyone's attention is drawn to Syria. Can you describe for us just how does Islamophobia play a role in
any of the arguments for intervention in Syria, really? KUMAR: Okay. It doesn't play a direct role in that. It is-- the

idea of humanitarianism has a long history in the United States. The idea that there
are victims all over the world, that the U.S. government has then got to make war in
order to, you know, somehow defend them, this goes back all the way to the SpanishAmerican war of 1898, which was supposed to be about rescuing Cubans. And similarly, you see these
sorts of justifications given. You know, Vietnamese need to be defended. In Iraq, it was babies,
apparently, who were being bayoneted in Kuwait , and therefore the U.S. needed to
intervene and defeat Iraq in 1991. So this idea of humanitarianism has a long history within the foreign
policy establishment. But what makes it particularly potent in this case is that after 9/11
what you see is the Bush administration projecting this idea of clash of
civilizations, which is basically the notion that we in the West are democratic , we
are rational, we are civilized, we are, you know, all things wonderful, and they in the
East are barbaric, they're misogynistic, and so on and so forth, and therefore we have
an obligation, what used to be called the white man's burden, to go off and rescue
them. And so you see some of that language, which is the idea that Arabs cannot bring democracy by
themselves, they cannot make change, and so we need to intervene. So it's a combination both of
the victim narrative, which has a long history, combined with this
language of clash of civilizations. DESVARIEUX: Okay. And how does this fit into domestic policy?
How do they work Islamophobia into domestic policy? KUMAR: Right. I mean, the comparison I make in the book and

the U.S. government, and U.S. imperialism in

particular, always needs an enemy. That is, when there is no humanitarian cause,
an enemy is an extremely useful way to justify wars abroad, as well as the
policing of dissent at home. So, for instance, during the Cold War we had been menacing enemy of
that I'm actually working on in the next book is that

the Soviet Union, against whom both a hot and a Cold War had to be waged. And, of course, this justified, then,
McCarthyism, because there's always a reflection of the external enemy inside, and these people have to be
rounded up, blacklisted, and so on and so forth. So that's the logic back then, and, of course, it was entirely about a
politics of fear. Today

we have the same sort of thing. After 9/11, the war on terror comes

into being precisely about fighting endless wars. Remember, back in 9/11 the
Bush administration was going to start with Afghanistan, go to Iraq, and then Iran,
Syria, and so on and so forth. It didn't work out that way. But the idea was to drum up
this fear of this menacing terrorist enemy, which justified wars all over the
world in order to gain the U.S.'s interest in [incompr.] particularly in the oil-rich region
in the Middle East. You asked me about domestic politics. Always there was a reflection of the domestic in
terms of the international threat. And so what you've seen is innocent Muslims--and often actually not even
Muslims, people from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, some of them Sikhs, some some of them Hindus,
some of them Christians, and so on, being racially profiled because that is the logic that comes out of this. I have a
whole chapter in the book about how the legal system has been reworked so as to justify things like indefinite
detention, things like torture, things like deportation. And, frankly, the infiltration of agents into our schools, into my

it's truly horrific the extent to which

Muslim Americans and people who look Muslim have been demonized
since 9/11.
school, into colleges, and so forth. So, you know,

My Partner and I advocate that the United States Federal

government should curtail its domestic surveillance of the
Muslim body.
The popular conception of surveillance focuses on a series of
wires, but violence against minority and anti-racist political
activists goes deeperAbdullahs death is the latest in a long
line of deadly uses of countersubversion through infiltration
this surveillance tactic has been used to disrupt challengers of
institutionalized racism since the rise of COINTELPRO. The
reading of the 1AC refuses the FBIs attempt to silence dissent
against American empire and opens up genuinely radical
political alternatives by challenging institutional racism.
Kundnani, 15Arun, Professor of Terror Studies and Media @ NYU & John Jay
College, formerly a Fellow @ Leiden U (Netherlands), an Open Society Fellow, and
Editor of Race and Class. The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and
the Domestic War on Terror, p. 10-15 BR
Two main modes of thinking pervade the war on terror, one predominantly among conservatives, the other among
liberals. The first mode locates the origins of terrorism in what is regarded as Islamic culture's failure to adapt to
modernity. The second identifies the roots of terrorism not in Islam itself but in a series of twentieth century
ideologues who distorted the religion to produce a totalitarian ideology-Islamism- on the models of communism and
fascism. The problem with both of these approaches is that they eschew the role of social and political
circumstances in shaping how people make sense of the world and then act upon it. Moreover, these modes of
thinking are not free-floating. They are institutionalized in the war on terror's practices, actively promoted by wellresourced groups, and ultimately reflect an imperialist political culture. Together they give rise to the belief that the
root cause of terrorism is Islamic culture or Islamist ideology; they thus constitute an Islamophobic idea of a Muslim
problem that is shared across the political spectrum. As a result, a key aspect of national security policy has been
the desire to engineer a broad cultural shift among Western Muslims while ignoring the ways in which Western
states themselves have radicalized- have become more willing to use violence in a wider range of
contexts.Islamophobia

is sometimes seen as a virus of hatred recurring in Western

culture since the Crusades. Others view it as a spontaneous reaction to terrorism
that will pass away as the effects of 9/11 recede into history. Many believe it does
not exist. My emphasis is on Islamophobia as a form of structural racism directed at

Muslims and the ways in which it is sustained through a symbiotic relationship with
the official thinking and practices of the war on terror. Its significance does not lie
primarily in the individual prejudices it generates but in its wider political
consequencesits enabling of systematic violations of the rights of Muslims and
its demonization of actions taken to remedy those violations. The war on terror
with its vast death tolls in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and
elsewherecould not be sustained without the racialized dehumanization of
its Muslim victims. A social body dependent on imperialist violence to sustain its
way of life must discover an ideology that can disavow that dependency if it is to
maintain legitimacy. Various kinds of racism have performed that role in the modern
era; Islamophobia is currently the preferred form. The usual objection to defining it
in this way is that Muslims are not a race. But since all racisms are socially and
politically constructed rather than reliant on the reality of any biological race, it is
perfectly possible for cultural markers associated with Muslimness (forms of dress,
rituals, languages, etc.) to be turned into racial signifiers.20 This racialization of
Muslimness is analogous in important ways to anti-Semitism and inseparable from the longer history of racisms in the US and the
UK. To recognize this obviously does not imply that critiques of Islamic belief are automatically to be condemned as racially
motivated; it does mean opposing the social and political processes by which antipathy to Islam is acted out in violent attacks on the
street or institutionalized in state structures such as profiling, violations of civil rights, and so on.21The academic and official models
of radicalization that have been central to the domestic war on terror have emerged within what the US and UK governments call a
preventive approach to counterterrorism, in which an attempt is made to identify individuals who are not terrorists now but might be
at some later date. But how do you identify tomorrow's terrorists today? That was also the implied question posed by Steven
Spielberg's 2002 film, Minority Report, in which a specialist PreCrime Unit uses three psychics called PreCogs to predict who will be
murderers in the future. The unit is then able to arrest precriminals before they have committed the crimes for which they are
convicted. Likewise, a preventive approach to the war on terror would need its own PreCogs' capability to identify the terrorists of
the future. To meet this need, security officials turned to academic models that claim scientific knowledge of a process by which
ordinary Muslims become terrorists; they then inferred the behavioral, cultural, and ideological signals that they think can reveal
who is at risk of turning into a terrorist at some point in the future. In the FBl's model, what they call "jihadist" ideology is taken to
be the driver that turns young men and women into terrorists. They pass through four stages: preradicalization, identification,
indoctrination, and action. In the second stage, growing a beard, starting to wear traditional Islamic clothing, and becoming
alienated from one's former life are listed as indicators; "increased activity in a pro- Muslim social group or political cause" is a sign
of stage three, one level away from becoming an active terrorist.22 Only the last stage in this model involves criminal conduct but,
as a New York Police Department (NYPD) paper on radicalization put it, the challenge is "how to identify, pre-empt and thus prevent
homegrown terrorist attacks given the non-criminal element of its indicators:'23 What this implies is that terrorism can only be
prevented by systematically monitoring Muslim religious and political life and trying to detect the radicalization indicators predicted
by the model. Sharing an ideology with terrorists is thus considered a PreCrime, a stage in the radicalization process. "The threat
isn't really from al-Qaeda central;' explained former FBI assistant director John Miller, "as much as it's from al-Qaeda-ism:'24
Deciding that al-Qaeda-ism-an ideological construct devised by the FBI-is a threat means that radicals who do not espouse violence
but whose ideas can be superficially associated with al-Qaeda, such as Imam Luqman, come to be seen as would-be terrorists. In
Minority Report, the PreCrime Unit is eventually shut down when the fallibility of the PreCogs is exposed. The FBI and other law
enforcement agencies continue to rely upon radicalization models with no predictive power in order to shape policies of surveillance,

The consequences of making the notion of radicalization central

to the domestic war on terror are far-reaching . When the government widened the
perceived threat of terrorism from individuals actively inciting, financing, or
preparing terrorist attacks to those having an ideology, they brought constitutionally
protected activities of large numbers of people under surveillance. Most
discussion of state surveillance attends to wiretapping, collection of Internet
communications data, closed-circuit television cameras, and other forms of
electronic surveillance of our online and offline lives. Edward Snowden's whistleblowing has made clear the extent to which the US National Security Agency
conducts warrantless surveillance of Internet and phone communication globally
and domestically.25 But central to counterradicalization practice is another
form of surveillance that is addressed less often: using personal relationships
within targeted communities themselves for intelligence gathering. When
community organizations and service providers such as teachers, doctors, and
youth workers develop surveillance relationships with law enforcement agencies,
infiltration, and entrapment.

when government community engagement exercises mask intelligence gathering,

and when informants are recruited from communities, surveillance becomes
intertwined with the fabric of human relation ships and the threads of trust upon
which they are built. The power and danger of these forms of surveillance derive
from their entanglement in everyday human interactions at the community level
rather than from the external monitoring capabilities of hidden technologies.
Moreover, having established such structures of surveillance in relation to Islamist
extremism, it becomes easy to widen them to other forms of radicalism occasionally to cover the far Right, but more often to left-wing protesters and
dissidents. Following from the widening of surveillance is the criminalization of
ideological activities previously understood to be constitutionally protected. This
can happen through the entrapment of individuals by law enforcement agencies or
through measures criminalizing the material support of terrorism, the definition of
which has been widened to include a broad range of ideological activities. Then,
because ideologies circulating among Muslim populations have been identified as
precursors to terrorism, the perception grows that Muslims have a special problem
with radicalization. In this context, leaders of targeted Muslim communities have
become intimidated by the general mood and aligned themselves with the
government, offering themselves as allies willing to oppose and expose dissent
within the community. Everyone who rejects the game of fake patriotism falls under
suspicion, as opposition to extremism becomes the only legitimate discourse .
Finally, the spectacle of the Muslim extremist renders invisible the violence
of the US empire. Opposition to such violence from within the imperium
has fallen silent, as the universal duty of countering extremism precludes any
wider discussion of foreign policy.26
The planting of informants and agents provocateurs among networks of political
radicals is a practice dating back at least 125 years , to the Russian tsar's secret
police, the Okhrana, and the early special branch at Scotland Yard. Lightly regulated
intelligence services have long used techniques of provocation to disrupt political
opposition, spread misinformation, and engineer violent crimes that would
otherwise not have happened, thereby securing the conviction of dissidents. This
was the countersubversion model the FBI's COINTELPRO initiative drew on in its
sustained and coordinated campaign to thwart constitutionally protected activism
and counteract political dissent during the 1960s. Targets included the civil rights,
black liberation, Puerto Rican independence, antiwar, and student movements. In an
attempt to neutralize Martin Luther King Jr., who, the FBI worried, might abandon his
"obedience to white liberal doctrines;' he was placed under intense surveillance,
and attempts were made to destroy his marriage and induce his suicide. The Black
Panther Party was disrupted in various cities by using fake letters and informants to
stir up violence between rival factions and gangs.27 The congressional hearings
initiated by Senator Frank Church in 1975 to examine the intelligence agencies
concluded that the FBI's activities Those at the agency behind the initiative were
never brought to justice for their activities, and similar techniques continued to be
used in the 1980s against, for example, the American Indian Movement and the
Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.29 In recent years, the US
domestic national security apparatus has effectively revived the

countersubversion practices of COINTELPRO. Campaign groups such as the Bill

of Rights Defense Committee have dubbed "COINTELPRO 2.0" tactics that amount
to a twenty first-century countersubversion strategy: the extensive surveillance of
Muslim-American populations; the deployment of informants; the use of agents
provocateurs; the widening use of material support legislation to criminalize
charitable or expressive activities; and the use of community engagement to
gather intelligence and effect ideological self-policing of communities. Significantly,
such practices have been encouraged, organized, and legitimized by the
radicalization models that law enforcement agencies adopted in the first decade
of the twenty-first century. Yet radicalizationin the truest sense of the word
is the solution, not the problem. Al-Qaeda's violent vanguardism thrives in
contexts where politics has been brutally suppressed or blandly gentrified. Opening
up genuinely radical political alternatives and reviving the political
freedoms that have been lost in recent years is the best approach to reducing
so-called jihadist terrorism.

Centering our praxis in this space is keyinterrogating

islamophobia in educational settings is critical to establish a
critical consciousness that enables larger political projects that
break down status quo conceptions of what domestic
surveillance is.
Housee 12, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
[Jan. 04 2012, Shirin Housee works at the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences, University of
Wolverhampton, UK Whats the point? Anti-racism and students voices against Islamophobia, Volume 15, Issue 1]

Having reflected on the two seminar sessions on Islamophobia and the student comments, I
am convinced that the work of anti-racism in university classrooms is
fundamentally important. As one student said racism is real. Through racism people suffer
physically, psychologically, socially, educationally and politically. Our work in
university classrooms is just the beginning of this challenge against racisms
and other oppressions. Classroom discussions and general teaching form a very
important contribution to this work of anti racism in education. There are no short cuts
or painless cuts; the work of anti-racism is a difficult one. As educators we should make use
of classroom exchanges; students engaged learning could be the key to promoting
anti-racism in our class. My goal is to teach in a way that engages students and leads them to reflect on the
socio-economic political/religions issues that surrounds theirs (our) lives. This article argues for making anti-racist

The student voice, that critiques mainstream thinking as

found in the media and elsewhere, is a starting point for this political work. I argue that
teaching and learning in our classroom should encourage the critical
consciousness necessary for pursuing social justice. Whilst I acknowledge
the limits of doing anti-racist campaign in university spaces, I argue that this is a
good starting point. And who knows, these educational exchanges may become (as with
my own story) the awakening for bigger political projects against injustices in
our society. In conclusion I endorse social justice advocates, such as Cunningham (cited in
Johnson-Bailey 2002, 43) who suggest that educators re-direct classroom practices and the
curriculum, because: if we are not working for equity in our teaching and learning
thinking possible in class.

environments, theneducators are inadvertently maintaining the status quo.

In conclusion I argue that a classroom where critical race exchanges and dialogues take
place is a classroom where students and teachers can be transformed.
Transformative social justice education calls on people to develop social, political
and personal awareness of the damages of racism and other oppression s. I end by
suggesting that in the current times of Islamophobic racism, when racist attacks
are a daily occurrence, in August and September 2010 alone, nearly 30 people have
been racially abused and physically attacked (Institute of Race Relations 2010). The
point of studying racism, therefore, is to rise to the anti-racist challenge, and for me,
a place to start this campaign is within Higher Education Institutions, optimistic as
it might sound, I believe, as asserted by Sheridan (cited in Van Driel 2004) that: Education can enlighten
students and promote positive attitudes. Education settings can be the first
arena in which battles can be fought against Islamophobia. It is to
education that our attention should be directed. (162)

Deconstructing and interrogating flawed assumptions behind

Islamophobia is critical to establish a transformative and
liberatory pedagogy that enables us as agents to challenge
racist dynamics
Zine 4, Professor of Sociology and Equity Studies
[2004, Jasmin Zine is a researcher studying Muslims in the Canadian diaspora. She teaches graduate courses in the
Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the
University of Toronto in the areas of race and ethnicity, anti-racism education and critical ethnography., AntiIslamophobia Education as Transformative Pedadogy: Reflections from the Educational Front Lines, American
Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 21:3]

As an anti-racism scholar and educator , fellow colleagues and I realized from as early as September
12 that t
here was an urgency to frame a critical pedagogical response to address
and challenge the rampant Islamophobia affecting the realities of Muslims from
all walks of life and social conditions. Among the most vulnerable were children and
youth, who received little support from schools in dealing with the backlash that many were experiencing on a
routine basis. Most schools were reluctant to engage in any response beyond the politically neutral arena of crisis

there was a clear resistance to

addressing or even naming issues of racism and Islamophobia. In fact, the discursive
language to name and define the experiences that Muslims were encountering on a
day-to-day basis did not even exist within the educational discourse . While schools were
reluctant to name specific incidents as racism part of an all-too-common denial the notion of
Islamophobia did not have any currency at all. In fact, it was not a part of the
language or conceptual constructs commonly used by educators, even by those
committed to multicultural and antiracist pedagogy. I realized the urgency to map
a new epistemological and pedagogical terrain by creating an educational
framework for addressing Islamophobia. Within the existing equity-based educational
frameworks, one could find the conceptual and pedagogical tools to address issues
of racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and anti-Semitism . However, the
discursive foundations for dealing with Islamophobia and the
accompanying educational resources simply did not exist . Developing a new
management. Among the school districts that I was in contact with,

Being able to name

and define the experience of Muslims as the result of Islamophobia was critical to
shaping the kind of interventions that would take place from a critical educational
standpoint. Before outlining a methodology for conducting anti-Islamophobia
education, it was necessary to develop some discursive foundations, arrive at a
definition of Islamophobia, and create an understanding of what it was that we
sought to challenge and resist. From a socio-psychological standpoint, the notion of Islamophobia
framework to fill this gap involved coining a new term: Anti-Islamophobia Education.

is often loosely translated as an attitude of fear, mistrust, or hatred of Islam and its adherents. However, this
definition presents a narrow conceptual framework and does not take into account the social, structural, and
ideological dimensions through which forms of oppression are operationalized and enacted. Applying a more holistic

Islamophobic attitudes are, in fact, part of a

rational system of power and domination that manifests as individual, ideological,
and systemic forms of discrimination and oppression. The idea that discrimination, be
it based on race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, or religion, simply stems from ignorance allows
those engaged in oppressive acts and policies to claim a space of innocence. By
analysis, far from being based on mere ignorance,

labeling Islamophobia as an essentially irrational fear, this conception denies the logic and rationality of social

to
capture the complex dimensions through which Islamophobia operates, it is
necessary to extend the definition from its limited conception as a fear and hatred of Islam and
Muslims and acknowledge that these attitudes are intrinsically linked to individual,
ideological, and systemic forms of oppression that support the logic and rationale of
specific power relations. For example, individual acts of oppression include such practices as name-calling
dominance and oppression, which operates on multiple social, ideological, and systemic levels. Therefore,

or personal assault, while systemic forms of oppression refer to the structural conditions of inequality regulated
through such institutional practices as racial profiling or denying jobs or housing opportunities. These

exclusionary practices are shored up by specific ideological underpinnings, among

them the purveyed notions designed to pathologize Muslims as terrorists and
impending threats to public safety. Understanding the dimensions of how systems of
oppression such as Islamophobia operate socially, ideologically, and systemically
became a key component of developing educational tools that would help
build the critical skills needed to analyze and challenge these dynamics .
From a discursive standpoint, I locate anti-Islamophobia education within a integrative anti-racism framework5 that
views systems of oppression based on race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and religion as part of a multiple and
interlocking nexus that reinforce and sustain one another. Based on this understanding, I have mapped some key
epistemological foundations for anti-Islamophobia education.6 This includes the need to reclaim the stage
through which Islam is represented from the specter of terrorists and suicide bombers to a platform of peace and
social justice. Reclaiming

the stage requires adopting a pedagogical approach that

shifts the popular media discourse away from the negative, essentialized referents
and tropes of abject Otherness ascribed to Muslims. This move involves
presenting a critical counter-narrative in order to reframe the Manichean
worldview and clash of civilizations narratives typically being purveyed in order to
present a more nuanced, reasoned, and critical perspective of the global
sociopolitical realities that Muslim individuals and societies are confronting,
engaging, and challenging. Another foundational aspect of anti-Islamophobia
education involves interrogating the systemic mechanisms through which
Islamophobia is reinforced, by analytically unraveling the dynamics of power in
society that sustain social inequality. Racial profiling, which targets groups on the basis of their
race, ethnicity, faith, or other aspects of social difference, and similar issues are major systemic
barriers that criminalize and pathologize entire communities . In schools, the practice of
color-coded streaming, whereby a disproportionate number of racially and ethnically marginalized youth are
channeled into lower non-academic level streams, is another example of institutionalized racism.

Negative

perceptions held by teachers and guidance counselors toward racialized students

have often led to assumptions of failure or limited chances for success , based on such
false stereotypes as the notion that Islam doesnt value education for girls or Black students wont succeed.

negative attitudes are relayed to students through the hidden curriculum

of schooling and lead to lower expectations being placed upon youth from specific
communities.7 Developing critical pedagogical tools to analyze and develop
challenges to these systems of domination is part of building a transformative
and liberatory pedagogy, one geared toward achieving greater social justice in
both schools and society. Another key goal of anti-Islamophobia education involves
the need to demystify stereotypes. Since 9/11, renewed Orientalist constructions of difference have
These

permeated the representation of Muslims in media and popular culture. Images of fanatical terrorists and burqa-clad

Deconstructing and demystifying these

stereotypes is vital to helping students develop a critical literacy of the
politics of media and image-making. Critically examining the destructive impact
of how these images create the social and ideological divide between us and
them is important to exposing how power operates through the politics of
representation.
women are seen as the primary markers of the Muslim world.

2ac Impacts

2ac Biopower/Colonialism
**note also in 2ac a2 benign hegemony
The War on Terror relies on the constructed image of the
Other against the dignified and moral force of US hegemony
recreates violence, biopower, and colonialism
Crowe, 7researcher at York Centre for International and Security Studies, York
University, (L.A., "The Fuzzy Dream: Discourse, Historical myths, and Militarized
(in)Security - Interrogating dangerous myths of Afghanistan and the West",
www.eisa-net.org/be-bruga/eisa/files/events/turin/Crowe-loricrowe.pdf)//twemchen
These elements of oppositional binaries is closely related to the second element: contemporary discourse has developed from and
further perpetuates a particular ideology that emmanates from a neo-liberal capitalist and imperial agenda that is founded upon
neo-colonialist attitudes and assumptions. The

US campaign to fight terrorism, initiated after September

crystallized all the ideological underpinnings of colonial and
imperial policies towards the constructed other.82 This emerges in the
heroism myth mentioned above; for example, Debrix explains how narratives around humanitarianism serve an
11th explains Nahla Abdo has

ideological purpose in that it contributes to the reinforcement of neoliberal policies in pathological regions of the international

neoliberal globalisation relies on the

institutionalization of neo-colonialism and the commodification and (re)colonization of labor
via militarized strategies of imperial politics. That is, as Agathangelou and Ling point out, Neoliberal
landscape.83 It also emerges in the militarization myth, insofar as

economics enables globalized militarization.84 Embedded in this normalization of neo-colonial frames are the elements of linearity
and thus assumed rationality of reasoning in the West. As Canada stepped up its role in direct combat operations (which included an
increase of combat troops, fighter jets, and tanks with long-range firing capacities85), Stephen Harper appealed to troop morale on
the ground in Afghanistan, stating: Canada and the international community are determined to take a failed state and create a
"democratic, prosperous and modern country."86 (my italics) Proposed solutions to the conflict(s) in Afghanistan have been framed
and justified not only as saving backwards Afghanistan but also as generously bringing it into the modern, capitalist, neoliberal
age. Moreover, this element represents an continuity of colonial power, presenting the one correct truth or resolution, emmanating

Representations of Afghanistan present

Western voices as the authority and the potential progress such authority can bring to the East as
naturally desirable. This rationality also presumes an inherent value of Western
methodology (including statistical analysis, quantification of data, etc) and devalues alternative
epistemologies including those of the Afghan people. This is problematic for several reasons: 1) It
forecloses and discourages thinking outside the box and instead relies upon the
masters tools which include violent military force, the installation of a democratic regime,
from the objective gaze of the problem-solving Western world.

peacekeeping, and reconstruction and foreign aid alternative strategies are deemed radical, unworkable, and anti-American;

2) it prioritizes numbers and statitistics over lived experiences . By relying on tallies

of deaths, percetages of voters, and numbers of insurgents for example, the experiences of those living in the region are obfuscated

3)it reproduces a colonial hierarchy of knowledge production .

Old colonial narratives of have re-surfaced with renewed vigor in the case of Afghanistan is contingent on
and mutually reinforced by opposing narratives of a civilized and developed
West. For example: Consider the language which is being usedCalling the perpetrators evildoers, irrational, calling them the
and devalued, and;

forces of darkness, uncivilized, intent on destroying civilization, intent on destroying democracy. They hate freedom, we are told.
Every person of colour, and I would want to say also every Aboriginal person, will recognize that language. The language of us

This
colonizer/colonized dichotomy is key to the civilisational justification the US
administration pursues (We wage war to save civilization itself88) which, as Agathangelou and Ling explain, is
versus them, of civilization versus the forces of darkness, this language is rooted in the colonial legacy.87

motivated by a constructed medieval evil that threatens American freedom and democracy, the apotheosis of modern civilization,
and therefore must be disciplined/civilized. In his Speech to Congress on September 21, 2001, Bush portrays the irrational Other as
Evil and retributive seeking to destroy the developed, secure prosperous and civilized free world: These terrorists kill not merely
to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of lifeAl Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making money;

This production of othering

and re-institutionalization of colonial discourse has been enabled by and facilitated
its goal is remaking the world, and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere.89

culture clash explanations.90 The danger of such theories, warns Razack, lies not only in
their decontextualization and dehistoricization, but also on its reliance on the
Enlightenment narrative and notions of European moral superiority that justify the
use of force. This is evident in the unproblematic way in which outside forces have
assumed a right of interference in the region spanning from the 18th century when imperial powers demarcated
the Durrand Line (which created a border between British India and Afghanistan with the goal of making Afghanistan an effective
buffer statefor British Imperial interests91) to the American intervention that began in the Cold War, followed by the Soviets in the
1980s and the Americans, Canadians and British today. In fact, The Wests practical engagement in Afghanistan reveals how it has
served to reporoduce this neo-colonial myth as well as the complexities and paradoxes which simultaneously de-stabilize that myth.
During the cold war, the Soviet and the Americans used Afghanistan as the battleground for power, choosing to sponsor and
condemn various regimes as they saw fit; this history of foreign engagement contributed to state fragmentation, underdevelopment,
and the self-sustaining war-economy that persist today. An example of this is the use of rentier incomes during the early 1900s that
were used as a means of control and coercion.92

That culminates in violence, war, and genocide.

Foucault 78 (Michel late philosopher, History of Sexuality An Introduction Vol.
1, Vintage Books, p. 135-137) **We do not agree with this authors use of gendered
language
For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right
to decide life and death. In a formal sense, it derived no doubt from the ancient
patria potestas that granted the father of the Roman family the right to "dispose" of
the life of his children and his slaves; just as he had given them life, so he could
take it away. By the time the right of life and death was framed by the classical
theoreticians, it was in a considerably diminished form. It was no longer considered
that this power of the sovereign over his (their) subjects could be exercised in an
absolute and unconditional way, but only in cases where the sovereign's very
existence was in jeopardy: a sort of right of rejoinder. If he were threatened by
external enemies who sought to over-throw him or contest his rights, he could then
legitimately wage war, and require his subjects to take part in the defense of the
state; without "directly proposing their death," he was empowered to "expose their
life": in this sense, he wielded an "indirect" power over them of life and death.' But
if someone dared to rise up against him and transgress his laws, then he could
exercise a direct power over the offender's life: as punishment, the latter would be
put to death. Viewed in this way, the power of life and death was not an absolute
privilege: it was conditioned by the defense of the sovereign, and his own survival.
Must we follow Hobbes in seeing it as the transfer to the prince of the natural right
possessed by every individual to defend his life even if this meant the death of
others? Or should it be regarded as a specific right that was manifested with the
formation of that new juridical being, the sovereign?' In any case, in its modern
form-relative and limited-as in its ancient and absolute form, the right of life and
death is a dissymmetrical one. The sovereign exercised his (their) right of life only
by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing ; he (they)evidenced his
power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right which
was formulated as the "power of life and death" was in reality the right to take life
or let live. Its symbol, after all, was the sword. Perhaps this juridical form must be
referred to a historical type of society in which power was exercised mainly as a
means of deduction (prelevement), a subtraction mechanism, a right to appropriate
a portion of the wealth, a tax of products, goods and services, labor and blood,
levied on the subjects. Power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure: of

things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated, in the privilege to seize
hold of life in order to suppress it. Since the classical age the West has undergone a
very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power . "Deduction" has
tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among
others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the
forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering
them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or
destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a
tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to
define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is
now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure,
maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since
the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit
such holocausts on their own populations . But this formidable power of death -and
this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has
so greatly expanded its limits -now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that
exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and
multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars
are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are
waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for
the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have
become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so
many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be
killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has
caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that
initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by
the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this
process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the
power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. The principle underlying
the tactics of battle-that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living-has
become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in
question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological
existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is
not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is
situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale
phenomena of population.

2ac D-Rule/Ethics
Responsibility to Other is a prerequisite to making other moral
systems humane. Failure to ground other ethical or
ontological theories in this encounter makes genocide
inevitable
Grob 99 Leonard Grob, Professor of Philosophy at Farleigh Dickinson University,
99, Ethics After the Holocaust, p. 8-11//EMerz
This face-to-face encounter is thus no cognitive event. As we have seen, I cannot
know the Other as Other without diminishing his or her otherness. I can, however,
encounter that Other in what Levinas terms an ethical event. Indeed, it is only with
the rending of the ontological schema that ethics first becomes possible. Prior to my
meeting with the Other, there is no ethics as such. Within the totality of being, I am
limited in my egoist ambition only by a lack of power. The Other who meets me
face-to-face challenges my very right to exercise power. In so doing, ethics is born.
Cognition no longer represents the highest activity of which a human is capable; it
is replaced by "revelation" of the Other as an ethical event in which, for the first
time, I come to realize the arbitrariness of my egoist ambitions. The thematizing of
the cognitive subject is replaced by nothing short of an act of witness on the part of
a being who now becomes an ethical subject. The Other who contests me is an
Other truly independent of my appropriative powers and thus one to whom I can
have, for the first time, ethical obligations. As Levinas puts it, this Other is the first
being whom I can wish to murder. Before the totality is rent by the manifestation of
the face, there can be no will to act immorally, as there can be no will to act
morally, in any ultimate sense of that word. If one begins with the "imperial I"
appropriating its world, ethics as such can never be founded. The other with whom I
inter- act is simply a datum, an aspect of my universe. Morality makes its first
appearance when I confront the Other who is truly Other. Although the Other
appears to me now, on principle, as someone I could wish to kill, he or she in fact
summons me to respond with nonviolence: I am called to willingly renounce
my power to act immorally. What I hear from the Other, Levinas claims, are the
words "Thou shalt not kill." Harkening to this injunction constitutes my inaugural act
as an ethical being. In Levinas's words, "Morality begins when freedom, instead of
being justified by itself, feels itself to be arbitrary and violent." Addressing the face
of the Other I become ethical. In a turnabout from what has been the norm in the
history of Western thought, ethics now is seen, by Levinas, to constitute the essence
of philosophy. Ethics is now "first philosophy," a position usurped until now by the
ontological enterprise. The meeting with the Other-who-is-truly-Other is a primordial
event: "Since the Other looks at me," Levinas exclaims, "I am responsible for him,
without even having taken on responsibilities in his regard " In encountering the
Other, I assume responsibility for him. "Responsibility," Levinas proclaims, "is the
essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity.... Responsibility in fact
is not a simple attribute of subjectivity, as if the latter already existed in itself,
before the ethical relationship."'" In other words, my structure as a human being, in
any significant sense of that word, is to be responsible to the Other. My personhood

is not to be identified with that of the solitary ego appropriating its world; it is rather
a personhood fundamentally oriented toward the Other. Ethics, for Levinas, is thus
not to be identified with any ethical or even meta-ethical position. Levinas speaks
neither as deontologist nor consequentialist. He does not attempt to
articulate any list of rights or obligations, or even the principles on which the latter
would be based. All ethical theories, he implies, are secondary to, or derivative
from, a primordial or founding moment: the encounter with the face of the
Other. It is this moment-of-all-moments which institutes the very possibility of the
"ethical" systems so hotly debated within the history of Western thought. Before
there can be any ethical positioningbefore there can be discussions of virtue,
happiness, dutiesthere is the meeting with the Other. Ethics is no set of directives;
rather, in Levinas's words, Already of itself ethics is an 'optics,' a way of seeing
which precedesand foundsall that has heretofore been identified as ethical
philosophy. The import of this notion of the primacy of ethics for a rethinking of
philosophy in the post-Holocaust age cannot be emphasized strongly enough. For
Levinas, philosophy-as-ontology reveals being as nothing short of "war": The visage
of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality which dominates
Western philosophy. Individuals are reduced to being bearers offerees that
command them unbeknown to themselves. The meaning of individuals (invisible
outside of this totality) is derived from the totality. Individuals within the "being"
constructed by philosophers are merely creatures of the schematizing mind. Such a
concept of philosophy is ill-equipped to address the great ethical issues which arise
in the study of the Holocaust. Indeed, for Levinas, "War is not only one of the
ordealsthe greatestof which morality lives; it renders morality derisory." Within
the terms of warfare, lying, stealingeven killinglose whatever ethical import
they might have. I simply engage in these acts as "necessary" within the universe
created by war. If the being studied by traditional philosophy is conceived of as war,
morality loses its core meaning. Not only is no fundamental ethical critique of the
events of the Holocaust possible within the terms of philosophy-as-ontology, but, as
I have noted above, it can be argued that the mode of appropriative thinking of
philosophers in our Western tradition has contributed to the creation of a climate in
which genocide can flourish. If, in ontological terms, individual beings are said to
have their meaning solely within the totality in which they find themselves,
totalizing thinking may well become totalitarian. Jews and other victims of Nazi
oppression were dehumanized precisely by being viewed in terms of racial
categories applied to them as a whole. If philosophy is a mere egology, as Levinas
claims, the totalizing cognitive subject can, at the far end of a continuum, be seen
to pass over into the autocratic "I" of the leaders of the Third Reich. In contrast to
that appropriative thinking which can lead to the brutal dehumanization of the kind
present in war, the face-to-face relationship is a pacific one. It is a relationship
which establishes a peace which is no mere truce, no temporary cessation of
inevitable hostilities. For traditional philosophy, knowledge is power, a power
capable of harnessing technology to evil ends. The absolute end of philosophy is
its goal of achieving total mastery of being; it is thus not at all illogical to foresee a
progression from conceptual to physical mastery of one's world. Once the locus of
an "absolute" is placed in the powers of the "I," the other person cannot fail to
become merely another datum in a world whose meaning derives itself entirely from

me. Often I may treat her or him in terms of what in the West has been called
"goodness." Yet such goodness, for Levinas, is accidental, the product of a
determination on my part that it is in my self-interest to act in a given manner in a
given situation. The fundamental reference point remains the "I." Goodness thus
established, I argue, along with Levinas, is a goodness which is simply not good
enough!

2ac Nuke War K

Nuclear war is already waged against black and brown bodies
the only way to challenge that violence rather than hope to
mitigate it is through challenging social oppression that
begets militarism
Labalme 2
(Activism: Peace: NVCD: Discrimination,
http://www.activism.net/peace/nvcdh/discrimination.shtml; Jacob)
our struggle is not only against missiles and bombs, but against the system
of power they defend: a system based on domination, on the belief that some
people have more value than others, and therefore have the right to control others, to exploit
them so that they can lead better lives than those they oppress. We say that all people have value. No
person, no group, has the right to wield power over the decisions and resources of
others. The structure of our organizations and the processes we use among ourselves are our best attempt to live
our belief in self-determination. Besides working against discrimination of all kinds among
ourselves, we must try to understand how such discrimination supports the system
which produces nuclear weapons. For some people who come to this action, the overriding
issue is the struggle to prevent nuclear destruction . For others, that struggle is not
separate from the struggles against racism, sexism, classism, and the oppression of
groups of people because of their sexual orientation, religion, age, physical
(dis)ability, appearance, or life history. Understood this way, it is clear that nuclear weapons
are already killing people, forcing them to lead lives of difficulty and struggle.
Nuclear war has already begun, and it claims its victims disproportionately from
native peoples, the Third World, women, and those who are economically vulnerable
because of the history of oppression. All oppressions are interlocking. We
separate racism, classism, etc. in order to discuss them, not to imply that any form
of oppression works in isolation. We know that to work against any one of these is not just
to try to stop something negative, but to build a positive vision. Many in the movement call
In this action,

this larger goal feminism. Calling our process "feminist process" does not mean that women dominate or exclude
men; on the contrary, it challenges all systems of domination. The term recognizes the historical importance of the
feminist movement in insisting that

nonviolence begins at home, in the ways we treat

each other. Confronting the issues that divide us is often painful. People may feel guilty, or hurt, or react
defensively when we begin to speak of these things, as if they were being personally accused. But working through

taking responsibility for our oppressive behavior, is part of our

struggle to end the nuclear arms race. Asking members of oppressed groups to be
the catalyst for this change is avoiding our own responsibility for discrimination.
Most of us benefit from some form of privilege due to our sex, or class, or skin color, or sexual
this pain together,

orientation, but that privilege is limited. None of us alone has the power to end institutions of discrimination. Only
when we struggle together can we hope to do so -- and when pain and hurt arise in that struggle, we can see it as a
measure of the depth to which discrimination hurts us all, keeping us separated and divided in our strength.

Racism, Classism, Sexism, Heterosexism and Militarism Part of struggling against

nuclear weapons involves understanding the ways in which the oppression of particular
groups of people supports militarism, makes the institutionalized system of war and
violence appear "natural" and "inevitable." For instance, heterosexism, or the assumption that
sexual relations are only permissible, desirable, and normal between opposite sexes, justifies a system of

rigid sex roles, in which men and women are expected to behave and look in particular ways, and in which
qualities attributed to women are devalued. Thus, men who are not willing to be
violent are not virile -- they are threatened with the real sanctions placed on homosexuality (physical
violence, housing and economic discrimination) unless they behave like "real men." The military
relies upon homophobia (the fear of homosexuality) to provide it with willing enlistees, with soldiers who
are trained to kill others to prove their masculinity. Sexism, or the systematic devaluation of women, is
clearly related to this. Women have traditionally opposed war because women bear the next generation
and feel a responsiblity to protect it. But feminists are not content to speak only from traditional roles as mothers

Many activists see a feminist analysis as crucial to effectively challenging

militarism. The system of patriarchy, under which men benefit from the oppression of women, supports
and thrives on war. In a sexist or patriarchal society, women are relegated to limited roles
and valued primarily for their sexual and reproductive functions, while men are seen as the
central makers of culture, the primary actors in history. Patriarchy is enforced by the language and images
and nurturers.

of our culture; by keeping women in the lowest paying and lowest status jobs, and by violence against women in
the home and on the streets. Women are portrayed by the media as objects to be violated; 50% of women are

The sexist splitting of humanity which

turns women into others, lesser beings whose purpose is to serve men, is the same split which
allows us to see our enemies as non-human , fair game for any means of destruction or cruelty. In
war, the victors frequently rape the women of the conquered peoples. Our country's
battered by men in their lives, 75% are sexually assaulted.

foreign policy often seems directed by teenage boys desparately trying to live up to stereotypes of male toughness,
with no regard for the humanity or land of their "enemy." Men are socialized to repress emotions, to ignore their

Emotions, tender feelings, care for the

living, and for those to come are not seen as appropriate concerns of public policy. This
makes it possible for policymakers to conceive of nuclear war as "winnable."
Similarly, racism, or the institutionalized devaluation of darker peoples, supports both the idea and
the practice of the military and the production of nuclear weapons. Racism operates as a
system of divide and conquer. It helps to perpetuate a system in which some people consistently are
"haves" and others are "have nots." Racism tries to make white people forget that all people
need and are entitled to self-determination, good health care, and challenging work.
Racism limits our horizons to what presently exists; it makes us suppose that current injustices
are "natural," or it makes those injustices invisible. For example, most of the uranium used
in making nuclear weapons is mined under incredibly hazardous conditions by people
of color: Native Americans and black South Africans. Similarly, most radioactive and
hazardous waste dumps are located on lands owned or occupied by people of color.
If all those people suffering right now from exposure to nuclear materials were
white, would nuclear production remain acceptable to the white-dominated power
structure? Racism also underlies the concept of "national security": that the U.S.
must protect its "interests" in Third World countries through the exercise of military
force and economic manipulation. In this world-view, the darker peoples of the world are
incapable of managing their own affairs and do not have the right to selfdetermination. Their struggles to democratize their countries and become independent of U.S. military and
economic institutions are portrayed as "fanatic," "terrorist," or "Communist." The greatest danger of
nuclear war today lies in the likelihood of superpower intervention in Third World
countries, fueled by government appeals to nationalistic and racist interests. All
forms of discrimination are interrelated with economic discrimination , or classism.
needs to nurture and cherish other people and the earth.

Classism justifies a system in which competition is the norm, and profit is believed to be a universal motivation.
Thus, poor and working class people lack access to education, leisure time and frequently basic things like food and
shelter. But a classist society blames them for their poverty, or devalues their particular way of living. Classism
values certain kinds of work over others, and sets up a system of unequal rewards .

Our society threatens

the majority of our members with economic insecurity, forcing us to accept things
the way they are for fear of losing the few things we've gained through hard work. Since most poor
people are women, children and people of color, classism and other forms of discrimination work together to hide

Poor and working class people feel the effects of the

military directly, profoundly, and brutally. Vital social services have been cut to feed
the Pentagon. Inflation, aggravated by the military budget, chews away at what is left after disproportionately
high taxes are deducted from our pay. Poor people are prime military recruits , with historically little
access to draft deferments or information about conscientious objection, forced by unemployment to
think of the military as a "career opportunity." Our militarized society does not support
cooperative and socially productive work, but counts on unequal competition and economic deprivation
to provide workers in defense industries, miners in uranium mines, and soldiers in
the armed forces. No human being is born with discriminatory attitudes and beliefs.
Physical and cultural attitudes are not the causes of oppression; these differences
are used to justify oppression. Racist, classist, sexist, heterosexist, and all other
forms of discriminatory attitudes are a mixture of misinformation and ignorance
which have to be imposed on young people through a painful process of social
conditioning. These processes are left unchallenged partially because people feel
powerless to do anything about them. But the situation is not hopeless. People can
grow and change. Many successful struggles have taken place against structures of
exploitation and discrimination. We are not condemned to repeat the past.
the injustice of our economic system.

Discriminatory conditioning can be analyzed and unlearned. All people come from traditions which have a history
of resistance to injustice, and every person has their own individual history of resistance to discriminatory
conditioning. This history needs to be recalled and celebrated, and people need to listen to and learn from other
people's histories. When people act from a sense of informed pride in themselves and their own traditions, they will
be more effective in all struggles for justice and peace.

2ac Structural Violence

Islamophobia is a form of structural violence enabling
systematic oppression and vast death tolls globally through
the racialized dehumanization of Muslim victims that continues
unopposed
Prefer this impact structural violence is invisible and
exponential and you have an ethical duty to challenge it
Nixon 11
(Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow
Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 2-3)
we urgently need to
rethink-politically, imaginatively, and theoretically-what I call "slow violence." By slow violence I mean a
violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across
time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is
customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive
and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to
engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous,
but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of
temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic
challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere,
Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that

toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other
slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our
efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings-the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both
human and ecological that result from war's toxic aftermaths or climate change-are underrepresented in strategic

Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons

of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions
of violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating
invading countries with mass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however, requires
rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow violence. Such a
rethinking requires that we complicate conventional assumptions about violence as a
highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to
account for how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we
perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions-from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in
planning as well as in human memory.

particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images,

slow violence is
often not just attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier;
it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for
sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded.
and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially,

Domestic surveillance is a war on muslims waged through

technology only a new approach can reverse the invisibility of
violence against Muslims by the state
Huhtinen and Rantapelkonen 7, (Aki-Mauri. and Rantapelkonen, Jari. "The
War Against the Other and the Us - Political and Philosophical Problems of
Postmodern Worlds Atmosphere" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the
International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Hilton Chicago .Feb 28,
2007 Online <PDF>.2011-03-13
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p178927_index.html) //EMerz
Thanks to the information revolution warfare has lost much of its effectiveness and
all its glamour. The war of the information age has become an apocalyptic digital
game between Western superpowers and the fundamentalism-oriented poorer part
of the world. This asymmetric totalitarian framework reflects an attitude that gives
no chance to understanding the Other. As Emmanuel Levinas has said: the
relationship with the Other is not produced outside of the world, but puts in question
the world possessed. The difference between the Other and the Us does not
depend on different properties, such as technological standards, but on an
inevitable orientation of starting oneself toward the Other. [] Most terrorists have
been invisible, as only a few of them have been convicted in courtrooms. Yet more
innocent civilians and ordinary citizens have been killed in the total and
fundamental war, even with use of high-tech war machine as precision weapons.
Also our own citizens have been targeted by spy organizations in case somebody
is thinking or reading books that may indicate suspicious activity. As the 9/11
showed, there was a distinctive new feature: a privatised form of organized violence
which was earlier impossible took place worldwide in information networks. The
9/11 united we, a hope of the future against the other, and a relic of the
past. In addition to asking who is the other one can ask Who are we. Right after
the 9/11, the French newspaper Le Monde answered the questions: We are all
Americans.

2ac Imperialism
Islamic terrorism is a ruse created to justify and sanction
massive western violence and imperialism globally
Jackson, 7R. (2007), Constructing Enemies: Islamic Terrorism in Political and Academic
Discourse. Government and Opposition, 42: 394426. doi: 10.1111/j.1477-7053.2007.00229.x ya boy
Riley 2 fly
In contrast to first-order critique, second-order critique involves the adoption of a critical standpoint outside the discourse. In this
case, based on an understanding of discourse as socially productive or constitutive, and fully cognizant of the knowledgepower
nexus, a second-order critique attempts to expose the political functions and ideological consequences of the particular forms of

Islamic
terrorism is to construct and maintain national identity, primarily
through the articulation of a contrasting, negative other who
defines the Western self through negation. Given the extent to which the discourse has
penetrated the politics and culture of Western societies, it can hardly be doubted that Islamic terrorism now
functions as a negative ideograph. Directly related to this, as David Campbell has convincingly
representation enunciated by the discourse. One of the most important functions of the discourse of

100

demonstrated, the elaboration of an external threat such as that posed by Islamic terrorism is crucial to maintaining

ome have argued that

Western identity is dependent on the appropriation of a backward,
illiberal, violent Islamic other against which the West can organize
a collective liberal, civilized self and consolidate its cultural and
political norms. Beyond this broader systemic function, however, discourses affect certain kinds of social action not
internal/external, self/other boundaries and the writing of national identity.101 In fact, s

102

by directly or inevitably determining them but rather by rendering these actions plausible or implausible, acceptable or
unacceptable, conceivable or inconceivable, respectable or disrespectable, etc. 103 That is, discourses establish the initial ideational
conditions of possibility for action, while simultaneously constructing the wider meaning structures or common sense that make

denying the rationalpolitical demands of insurgent groups, demonizing them as fanatics

and essentializing them as violent, irrational, savage and fanatical,
the Islamic terrorism discourse normalizes and legitimizes a
restricted set of coercive and punitive counter-terrorism strategies,
whilst simultaneously making non-violent alternatives such as
dialogue, compromise and reform appear inconceivable and
nonsensical. This understanding of discourse further draws our attention to the ways in which discourse can be
those actions intelligible and legitimate. In this case, for example, it can be argued that by

deployed as a political technology in the hegemonic projects of various agents, such as state elites. In this case, it is possible to
describe a number of means by which the Islamic terrorism discourse functions to reify and expand the hegemonic power of
particular states. For example, by locating the source of contemporary terrorism in religious extremism, the discourse works to deny

by assigning
non-rational, cosmic aims to violent groups, the discourse
depoliticizes, decontextualizes and dehistoricizes the grievances
and political struggles of groups and societies, thereby de-linking
the motives of the terrorists from the policies of Western states or
their allies. Such socially constructed knowledge of Islamic terrorism thus facilitates or enables the uninterrupted
and obscure its political origins and the possibility that it is a response to specific Western policies. That is,

exercise of US and British power in the international sphere by obviating the need for policy reappraisal. At the same time, it
functions directly as a powerful discursive tool designed to de-invest insurgent groups of any political authority or wider socialcultural legitimacy they may have, in large part by appealing to the secular prejudice of Western societies. 104 More prosaically, it can

the policies made possible by the discourse also function directly to

extend and consolidate state power, and provide direct material and
discursive benefits to elements of the national security sector. For
example, intrusive surveillance, expanded police powers, control
orders, theregulation of public speech, investigations of charities
and the like, can and have been used to limit political dissent,
strengthen state security institutions and bring previously
unregulated social arenas like charities and religious activities
under greater state control. Linked to this, the analysis of public discourse by politicians
be seen that many of

clearly demonstrates that elites in the USA

and Britain

frequently deploy the discourse

of Islamic terrorism to legitimize or sell a range of international and domestic

political projects, including: regime change in states like Afghanistan and Iraq; the expansion of a military presence to new
regions such as Central Asia; the control of strategic resources like oil; increased military and political support for allies in strategic

; the
construction of domestic and international surveillance systems; the
control of international institutions and processes; and more
broadly, the preservation and extension of a Western-dominated liberal
international order. The frequency of narratives of Islamic terrorism in contemporary political speeches suggests
regions like the Horn of Africa and Central America; increased resources and power for the military establishment

that, following earlier patterns,105 the discourse is being used in a deliberative fashion as a political technology. Beyond exposing the
ideological functions of the discourse, another purpose of second-order critique is to examine the ethical normative consequences of
the discourse. In this case, it is suggested that the Islamic terrorism discourse is proving harmful to community relations, public

way the
Western self has been constructed in opposition to the Islamic other ,
morality and the search for effective, proportionate and legitimate responses to terrorist acts. First, given the

and given the negative subject positioning and predication within the discourse, the evidence of rising tensions between and within
local, national and global communities does not seem at all surprising. A recent survey of global opinion found that many

Westerners see Muslims as fanatical, violent and intolerant, while

many Muslims have an aggrieved view of the West. There is also evidence
106

increasing levels of Islamophobia across the United States and increases

in faith-hate crime in Britain and elsewhere. It seems reasonable to assume that this situation is at least in part
due to the ubiquitous public discourse that identifies Islam and
Muslims as a source of terrorism, extremism and threat. Related to this, it is
of

107

108

possible to detect an erosion of public morality in polling data that shows that significant proportions of the public in many Western
countries, but most notably in the United States, now agree that torturing terrorist suspects is justified in some circumstances. 109 It

the absence of public concern or outrage at the public

evidence of torture and abuse, the muted response to human rights
abuses committed by the security forces during counter-terrorism
operations and the ongoing and very serious public debate by academics, officials and journalists about the necessity and
can also be seen in

ethics of torture and other human rights abuses against terrorist suspects. This erosion of public morality is, I would suggest, directly
linked to the social and political construction of a pervasive discourse of threatening, murderous, fanatical Islamic terrorists who

Islamic
terrorism discourse is proving to be counter-productive in its
effects on the broader counter-terrorism campaign of the war on
terrorism. For example, it seems obvious that the discourse assists certain militant groups in promoting
their message that there is a fundamental conflict between Islam
and the West; in this sense, the language works to co-constitute the very threat it purports to counter. In addition,
narratives of fanatical, murderous, suicidal Islamic terrorists functions
to amplify rather than allay the social fear generated by terrorist actions because it reinforces the perception
that the attackers are inhuman killing machines who cannot be
deterred or reasoned with. In terms of foreign policy, the construction of a
global Islamic threat can contribute to support for governments who
actively suppress popular Islamic movements or cancel elections,
thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which imprisoned, tortured
and harassed activists decide that the use of violence is their only
recourse. More broadly, there seems little doubt that Western counter-terrorism policies, based in large part on the
productive categories of the Islamic terrorism discourse, are at least partly responsible
for intensifying cycles of violence and instability. That is, the Iraq
invasion, the destruction of Falluja, the Abu Ghraib abuses, the
Guantanamo prison camp, the practice of extraordinary rendition
and public support for Israel's war against Lebanon among others
are helping to construct further political grievances that could
provide the justification for further acts of terrorism. In part, these
patently self-defeating policies persist because the discourse
restricts and constructs the legitimate knowledge that is allowed
must be eradicated in the name of national security.110 At a more practical level, it can also be argued that the

111

to inform policy debate whilst simultaneously establishing the

parameters of legitimate action. Thus, within the confines of policy and public discussion about how to
deal with religiously inspired, murderous Islamic extremists for example, the possibility of diplomacy or policy reform
appears both implausible and illegitimate, while actual or suggested
policies of racial profiling, surveillance of mosques and schools, a
shoot-to-kill policy, control orders, restrictions on Islamic preachers,
shutting down extremist websites and bookshops, banning radical
groups, Islamic youth outreach programmes, asking academics to
spy on their studentsand prosecuting the glorification of terrorism,
appear as reasonable and legitimate. The main problem is that the central assumptions and
narratives the accepted knowledge underpinning these policies is, as I have demonstrated, both highly debatable and dismissive

highly politicized understanding of the

nature of contemporary political violence therefore, it seems safe to
predict that many current policies are likely to be ineffective and a
waste of resources.
of alternative accounts. Based on a restricted and

Imperialism is founded on secret, militaristic claims that justifies

endless international conflict and produces poor knowledge
production

Rule, 10PhD from Harvard, MA from Oxford University, BA from Brandeis (James
B, Winter 2010, The Military State of America and the Democratic Left, Dissent
Vol. 57 No 1)//twemchen
At this moment, for example, in 1 984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with
Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped
along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with
Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to
possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. We are not there, but the direction of movement

shrewd state manipulation of strategic

information makes it possible to defuse criticism and discredit public
skepticism, until it is too late. Many trends since Orwell's lifetime have aggravated the hazards that he
anticipated. One is globalism - the growth of an ever-moretightly connected world, so that people, ideas,
technologies, and even weapons move about the earth more and more readily. Such
is unmistakable. As the Iraq adventure has demonstrated,

conditions can facilitate terrorism, conceivably on a scale well beyond what the world has yet witnessed. On the

we see the rise of vast bureaucracies dealing in essentially

secret knowledge - intelligence about military matters and a host of other subjects held vital to
national security, yet supposedly too sensitive for public disclosure. Mobilization of
such knowledge in turn requires a high-tech establishment of civilian and military experts
whose activities cannot readily be monitored by outsiders. One result is that government
claims about matters of vital public concern, from weapons of mass destruction to terrorist dangers, are
not easily challenged in public debate. As Orwell warned, the state may change the menu of
state side of the equation,

deadly enemies from year to year but continue the same strictures on public inquiry and dissent. A few decades
ago, Iraq was America's ally; more lately, it reappeared as part of the axis of evil. China rises and falls in
Washington's official designations - sometimes a feared twenty-first-century competitor, more recently an ally in the
quest for Asian "stability" and indispensable supporter of the U.S. economy. Pakistan under its last dictator was a

stalwart participant in the so-called War on Terror. But that country could any day be redefined (with some

Who can say with confidence what demonic

qualities will be ascribed, perhaps quite accurately, to any of America's present-day allies, with the
next shake of this country's foreign-policy kaleidoscope ? And who can say what new military
exploits, or domestic restrictions, will be proclaimed essential to repress these demons of the future? The one
thing we can be sure of is that the supply of ugly movements and regimes around
the world shows no sign of running short. If their sheer presence suffices to justify a
hypermilitarized America and concomitant suppression of countervailing voices in
domestic life, we are embarked on a long journey in the direction of 1984. There has to be a better way - as we
justification) as a threat to the civilized world.

on the democratic Left should be the first to proclaim. In a dangerous world, any course of action bears risks. No

a steady diet of aggressive American military

action abroad might forestall disasters yet unseen. Nor can anyone deny that relentless
surveillance of domestic communications, or invocation of national security to rebuff all
challenges to the exercise of government power could, conceivably, help block further terrorist
acts on U.S. soil. But nor, for that matter, can anyone authoritatively deny that such measures might
actually make matters much worse.
one can absolutely rule out the possibility that

2ac Militarism
Islamophobia shapes US foreign policynotions of western
superiority drum up support for militaristic and elitist
interventions
Kumar 13 [Deepa Kumar. Associate Professor of Media Studies and Middle
Eastern Studies at the Rutgers University. Twelve Years Post 9/11, Islamophobia Still
Runs High, http://truth-out.org/video/item/18759-twelve-years-post-9-11islamophobia-still-runs-high]//EMerz
KUMAR: Absolutely not. I think it is true that larger numbers of conservative voters are racist. They are racist not
just in terms of their attitude towards Arabs and South Asians, but also to a whole host of other groups. So it's true

Islamophobia is far more systemic

than that. That is to say, the idea of a Muslim enemy, the idea of a terrorist enemy is one that actually goes
that this idea sort of concentrated within those ranks. But in fact

back a couple of decades but was brought to light after 9/11 by the political elite, by our political leaders. So in fact

it is built into the system of U.S. foreign policy in this country. And to simply look at the far right
and to ignore the fact that it has larger implications in terms of justifying U.S.
foreign policy would be really to have only an incomplete picture of what is at work
in this form of racism. DESVARIEUX: Okay. Let's talk about the mass media and how they depict Islam since
9/11. Can you describe for us how the mass media has depicted Islam? KUMAR: Well, basically, the trauma of 9/11,

the fact that, you know, 3,000 Americans died meant that it enabled the U.S. media to
actually draw on stereotypes that have been, you know, propped up by Hollywood, by the news
media, and so on for a few decades before that. And that was the idea that these are crazy,
irrational people. They are all apparently driven by Islam to violence. And so we should
lock them up, we should be suspicious of them, we should detain them at airports ,
and so on and so forth. And so that's what you saw in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. And this show called 24,
which your viewers may know, is--it's about a lot of things [incompr.] that it's about justifying the building of a
national security state and justifying practices like torture and so on and so forth. DESVARIEUX: Okay. And also the
story of the day, of course, is Syria, and everyone's attention is drawn to Syria. Can you describe for us just how
does Islamophobia play a role in any of the arguments for intervention in Syria, really? KUMAR: Okay. It doesn't play

The idea that

there are victims all over the world, that the U.S. government has then got to make
war in order to, you know, somehow defend them, this goes back all the way to the
Spanish-American war of 1898, which was supposed to be about rescuing Cubans. And similarly, you see
a direct role in that. It is--the idea of humanitarianism has a long history in the United States.

these sorts of justifications given. You know, Vietnamese need to be defended. In Iraq, it was babies, apparently,

this
idea of humanitarianism has a long history within the foreign policy establishment .
But what makes it particularly potent in this case is that after 9/11 what you see is the Bush
administration projecting this idea of clash of civilizations, which is basically the notion that we in
the West are democratic, we are rational, we are civilized, we are, you know, all things
wonderful, and they in the East are barbaric, they're misogynistic, and so on and so forth,
and therefore we have an obligation, what used to be called the white man's
burden, to go off and rescue them. And so you see some of that language, which is the idea that Arabs
who were being bayoneted in Kuwait, and therefore the U.S. needed to intervene and defeat Iraq in 1991. So

cannot bring democracy by themselves, they cannot make change, and so we need to intervene. So it's a
combination both of the victim narrative, which has a long history, combined with this language of clash of
civilizations. DESVARIEUX: Okay. And how does this fit into domestic policy? How do they work Islamophobia into
domestic policy? KUMAR: Right. I mean, the comparison I make in the book and that I'm actually working on in the

U.S. imperialism in particular, always needs an

enemy. That is, when there is no humanitarian cause, an enemy is an extremely useful
way to justify wars abroad, as well as the policing of dissent at home . So, for instance,
during the Cold War we had been menacing enemy of the Soviet Union, against whom both a
next book is that the U.S. government, and

hot and a Cold War had to be waged. And, of course, this justified, then, McCarthyism, because there's always a
reflection of the external enemy inside, and these people have to be rounded up, blacklisted, and so on and so

logic back then, and, of course, it was entirely about a politics of fear . Today
we have the same sort of thing. After 9/11, the war on terror comes into being precisely
about fighting endless wars. Remember, back in 9/11 the Bush administration was going to
start with Afghanistan, go to Iraq, and then Iran, Syria, and so on and so forth. It didn't work out
that way. But the idea was to drum up this fear of this menacing terrorist enemy , which justified
wars all over the world in order to gain the U.S.'s interest in [incompr.] particularly in the
oil-rich region in the Middle East. You asked me about domestic politics. Always there was a
reflection of the domestic in terms of the international threat . And so what you've seen is
innocent Muslims--and often actually not even Muslims, people from the Middle
East, North Africa and South Asia, some of them Sikhs, some some of them Hindus,
some of them Christians, and so on, being racially profiled because that is the logic that
comes out of this. I have a whole chapter in the book about how the legal system has been reworked
so as to justify things like indefinite detention, things like torture, things like deportation. And,
frankly, the infiltration of agents into our schools, into my school, into colleges, and so forth. So, you know, it's
truly horrific the extent to which Muslim Americans and people who look Muslim
have been demonized since 9/11.
forth. So that's the

2ac VTL
Surveillance on Muslim Americans creates psychologically
devastating anxiety that wrecks value to life
OConnor and Jahan 14 (Alexander J. OConnor and Farhana Jahan. Under
Surveillance and Overwrought: American Muslims Emotional and Behavioral
Responses to Government Surveillance. 2014. Vol. 8 Issue 1.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jmmh/10381607.0008.106?view=text;rgn=main) //EMerz
Work by political scientists finds two dominant emotion responsesanxiety and angerwhen people imagine being
monitored by the government (Best & Krueger, 2011). The emotional response of people personally experiencing

In the case of American Muslims experiencing

government surveillance, anxiety levels are likely particularly pronounced. Consider
that American Muslims monitored by the government, even after they are cleared of
suspicion, are in a precarious position. Given the covert nature of US government surveillance (ACLU,
2012; Ebadolahi, 2012), those previously monitored can never be certain that monitoring
has ceased. Even when believing surveillance has ceased, they may view themselves as likely targets of future
surveillance. Anxiety, not anger, is the typical response to such feelings of
uncertainty and uncontrollability in response to the prospect of negative
events (Lerner & Keltner, 2001). Furthermore, given evidence of higher levels of anxiety,
depression, sub-clinical paranoia, and dis-identification among American Muslims
who report more general forms of religious discrimination (Ahmed et al., 2011; Amer & Hovey,
2012; Rippy & Newman, 2006), those with potentially interminable experiences with
government surveillance may be especially prone to higher levels of anxiety. How do
government surveillance is, however, unknown.

American Muslims experiencing government surveillance regulate the anxiety and uncertainty of not knowing if and

Anxiety can inhibit the sort of behaviors that

originally elicited the anxiety (Lerner & Keltner, 2001; Shapiro & Neuberg, 2007; Steele, Spencer, &
when surveillance ceased or will resume in the future?

Aronson, 2002), while increasing vigilance for situational cues that may signal further threat (Murphy, Steele, &

Evidence from several literatures on stigma and social identity threat

demonstrates that avoiding behaviors, situations, or aspects of an identity can
serve as a recourse to avoiding the threat of being stigmatized, discriminated
against, or confirming a negative stereotype (Crocker, Major, & Steele, 1998; Davies, Spencer,
Gross, 2007).

Quinn, & Gerhardstein, 2002; Goffman, 1963; Pinel, 1999; Steele, 1997; Swim, Cohen, & Hyers, 1998). For instance,
African Americans under stereotype threat avoid expressing interest in activities stereotypically associated with

Such social identity threats also influence the regulation of

emotions such as anxietywith threat often facilitating strategies that avoid or suppress the cognitions
and emotions associated with that threat (Johns, Inzlicht, & Schmader, 2008). Given the research
described above, we predicted the following: Experiencing government surveillance will predict
(1) higher self-reported anxiety about the prospect of future surveillance and (2) an
increased vigilance around and avoidance of people, situations, behaviors, and
topics that could serve as signals inviting further surveillance . It is particularly troubling to
note that American Muslims, anxious over the threat of surveillance, may find
themselves vigilant and cautious around Americans who are not Muslims and fellow
their group (Steele & Aronson, 1995).

American Muslims. While non-Muslims are a potential threat to the extent they are perceived as informants,
settings frequented by fellow Muslims (e.g., Islamic settings such as mosque) may be perceived as contexts the
government is more likely to monitor. Further, we tested whether anxiety over further surveillance mediates the
relationship between experiences with surveillance and the avoidance of potentially signaling settings. Such
mediation would support the view that social identity threats, when increasing

anxiety, facilitate the use

of avoidant behaviors and strategies (Johns et al., 2008; Miller & Kaiser, 2001).
Ipsu article?:

Value to life should be at the core of your decision- other

weighing mechanisms justify atrocities
Berube 97. (David Berube. Professor of English at University of South Carolina.
Nanotechnological Prolongevity: The Down Side. 1997.)//EMerz
Assuming we are able to predict who or what are optimized humans, this entire resultant worldview smacks of
eugenics and Nazi racial science. This would involve valuing people as means. Moreover, there would always be a
superhuman more super than the current ones, humans would never be able to escape their treatment as means to

the
dehumanization of humanity. They warn: "its destructive toll is already greater than that of
any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record -- and its potential danger to the
an always further and distant end. This means-ends dispute is at the core of Montagu and Matson's treatise on

quality of life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation . For that reason this
sickness of the soul might well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.... Behind the genocide of the
holocaust lay a dehumanized thought; beneath the menticide of deviants and dissidents... in the cuckoo's next of

it may never be
possible to quantify the impact dehumanizing ethics may have had on humanit y, it is
America, lies a dehumanized image of man... (Montagu & Matson, 1983, p. xi-xii). While

safe to conclude the foundations of humanness offer great opportunities which would be foregone. When we
calculate the actual losses and the virtual benefits, we approach a nearly inestimable value greater than any tools
which we can currently use to measure it. Dehumanization is nuclear war, environmental apocalypse, and international

When people become things, they become dispensable. When people are dispensable,
any and every atrocity can be justified. Once justified, they seem to be inevitable for every epoch
has evil and dehumanization is evil's most powerful weapon.
genocide.

2ac Case XT

Mass Surveillance XT
Surveillance targets Muslims- decades of empirics prove
Fisher 4. (Linda E. Fisher. Associate Professor of Law and Director, Center for
Social Justice, Seton Hall Law School. Guilt by Expressive Association: Political
Profiling, Surveillance, and the Privacy of Groups p. 623-624.
http://www.arizonalawreview.org/pdf/46-4/46arizlrev621.pdf)// EMerz
The history of the FBI and other law enforcement surveillance gives scant comfort to
those engaged in lawful political and religious activities who are concerned about
becoming targets of surveillance.5 From its inception until restrictions on its activities were imposed in
the mid-1970sand even sometimes thereafterthe FBI regularly conducted politically
motivated surveillance, choosing targets based on their political or religious beliefs. As
part of its investigations, it compiled and widely disseminated political dossiers, engaged in
warrantless searches, and disrupted the lawful First Amendment activities of a wide
array of groups opposed to government policy. Local police Red Squads did the same.7 During the war in
Vietnam, the CIA, despite restriction of its mission to foreign intelligence, also conducted
domestic surveillance operations. Religious groups engaged in political activity were
among the targets of intelligence agency investigations. The most notorious example of FBI
overreaching was its five-year campaign to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. and to neutralize him as an effective
civil rights leader.10 These efforts included sending Dr. Kings wife a tape recording obtained from microphone
surveillance, accompanied by a note that many have interpreted as an attempt to induce him to commit suicide.11

Muslims who frequent mosques and Islamic centersparticularly those

that express religious or political views considered extremeare now
concerned about being subjected to abusive and unjustified law
enforcement behaviors similar to those documented by the Senate Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities (hereinafter Church Committee Report) in 1976. Without external
constraints, law enforcement almost inevitably investigates dissidents based on their political or religious
expression. Moreover, legal controls on surveillance have recently been lifted or modified, potentially facilitating
renewed political surveillance.

Otherization XT
Racializing Muslims through monolithic perspective turns them
into the other
Semati 10 (Mehdi Semati. Professor of Communication in the Department of
Communication at Northern Illinois University. Islamophobia, Culture and Race in
the Age of Empire. 2010. p. 265-266)//EMerz
The comedians observation on the racial order in the Unites States after 9/11
exposes several issues. The changing racial status overnight, as simplified as it is,
points out that not only is race not definable in biological terms (i.e. it is a social
construction), its construction is a product of history (see Wade 2002, Frankenberg
1993). Omi and Winants (1994) concepts of racial formation and racial projects are
particularly helpful here. Racial formation, the sociohistorical process through which
racial categories are created and transformed, is a process of historically situated
projects (p. 55, original emphasis). For them, a racial project is simultaneously an
interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to
reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines. Racial projects,
they maintain, connect what race means in a particular discursive practice and the
ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially
organized, based upon that meaning (p. 56). That our Arab-American comedian is
officially classified, by the US Census Bureau and other governmental agencies, as
white or Caucasian will not lessen his anxieties about being treated as an alien
Other or non-white. Although the population of Arab Americans is highly diverse
in terms of national origins and ancestry, religious background, and phenotypes
(even if Hollywood has reinforced the brown skin type), a monolithic image of Arab
Americans in the popular imagination persists. The diversity is even richer for
Muslim Americans: although two-thirds are foreign-born, their national
origins represent eighty different countries, from Asia, Africa, and the
Middle East, with 77 percent of them holding US citizenship. Among them are
white and African-American converts, native-born Muslims, and a wide range of
ethnic backgrounds (only 25 percent originate from Arab countries). As for other
indicators, Muslim Americans are better educated and better off than the nation as
a whole.17 Again, despite such diversity, the monolithic image of Muslim
Other persists in the popular and political discourses. In this context,
addressing racial formation in terms of racial projects at the macro level of social
processes, we may point to judicial, legislative, and administrative initiatives by the
state. The infamous words of President Bush in 2001, Either you are with
us, or you are with the terrorists, which neatly recuperates the bipolar
structure of the Cold War, (re)constitutes the us/ them structure. The
executive and legislative measures that have followed these initiatives have
included mass arrests, secret and indefinite detentions, prolonged detention of
material witnesses, closed hearings and use of secret evidence, government
eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations, FBI home and work visits,
wiretapping, seizures of property, removals of aliens with technical visa violations,
and mandatory special registration. As a result, as of 2004, at least 100,000 Arabs
and Muslims living in the United States have personally experienced one of these

measures.18 At the micro-social level, to follow the racial formation argument, we

might say that the state of being spooked and the ability to see suspicious brown
men (in this or similar cases) who look a particular way is a way of experiencing
racialization. In Omi and Winants (1994) language, our ability to interpret racial
meanings depends on the preconceived notions of a racialized social structure (p.
59). The color-coded terrorism threat advisory scale by the Homeland Security
Advisory System, and its politicized deployment by the Bush administration, is
where the social structure and the individual psychic meet. Here these projects,
against the backdrop of relentless cultural representations of Muslim Other, entail
the construction and intensification of the generic category of Arab-Middle EasternMuslim Other (see Naber 2006, Volpp 2003). In this hyphenated space we find the
work of racialization of the Other through racializing religion, national origins,
ethnicity, phenotypes (brown skin) and their intersections. As Naber (2006) has
argued, within the post-9/11 moment of crisis, the racialization of an Arab- Middle
Eastern-Muslim Other has been constituted by a dual process of cultural racism
and the racialization of national origin (p. 236). Cultural racism builds on a
conceptualization of race as culture, which in Goldbergs (1993) analysis includes
religion, language, and dress among others.

Whiteness XT
Racial attitudes towards people from the Middle East are
culturally constructed, forcing Muslims to hide their religion
and resulting in discrimination against those of non-European
descent
Elver, 12 Professor of Global Studies at Cal Berkeley (Hilal, " TEN YEARS AFTER
9/11: RETHINKING COUNTERTERRORISM: Racializing Islam Before and After 9/11:
From Melting Pot to Islamophobia", in Transnational Law and Contemporary
Problems Vol. 21 Issue 119, p. 7//ejh)
In this period, "immigration statutes forced the American legal system to confront
the task of defining what or who constituted the white race for the purpose of
naturalization." n60 In many court decisions "individuals sued to be de-clared white
by law after being denied citizenship rights by immigration authorities on the
grounds of racial ineligibility." n61 Simply put, the Middle Eastern immigrants had
difficulty obtaining citizenship. n62 The law held that the term "white person" really
meant a person of European descent. n63
"The problem of racial identification and citizenship traumatized the Arabicspeaking community." n64 While they tried to convince authorities that Arabs were
"white," they carefully covered their Islamic identity. n65 [*134] Nev-ertheless,
negative attitudes toward immigrants from the Ottoman Empire were deeply racial
and included even Chris-tian immigrants. For instance, during World War I,
Armenians escaping from an Ottoman-era massacre in Anatolia did not find
welcoming attitudes in the United States. n66 The courts did not easily recognize
the rights of "Ottoman Turks" in citizenship cases. n67 Affiliation with the larger
Muslim community, rather than the smaller Christian political and social community
in the homelands, determined the courts' perception of Armenians as Muslim and
"polygamist." n68 American understanding of Islam and life in "the Orient" was a
stronger denominator than who an actual person was and which religion he
belonged to. Citizenship is connected not simply to skin color, but to cultural origin European descent.

A2 Alt Causes**
A discussion of its historical and global origins is the key
starting point to breaking down the power and prevalence of
the surveillance order
Renton, 6/4/15professor at the Edge Hill University for History and English
Department, Honorary Senior Research Associate in the Department of Hebrew and
Jewish Studies at University College London (James, "CFP: Islamophobia and
Surveillance: Genealogies of a Global Order", International Society for Intellectual
History, isih.history.ox.ac.uk/?p=4590)//twemchen
The global order of State and inter-State surveillance has become an integral feature of contemporary human life.

For a typical individual inhabiting State-controlled spaces, the apparatus of monitoring is

inescapable embedded in technologies and legal frameworks of movement,
communication, and capital. Beyond these mechanisms and tools, States are enlisting an ever
expanding circle of human agents of surveillance both willing and unwilling in education; communal
organisations; commerce. The structures and philosophy of surveillance are interwoven with those
of State incarceration and killingfrom extra-judicial killing to war. This triangle is not just
a part of any so-called War on Terror; it cannot be reduced to the Drone icon or processes such as extraordinary

the surveillance/control triangle is an integral and defining aspect

of todays State and global inter-State system. Islamophobia did not invent State
surveillance; nor is surveillance confined to the Islamic enemy. Nonetheless , the extent
and shape of todays surveillance order derives in large part from fear of Muslims and Islam.
rendition. Rather,

This symposium is concerned with the genealogies of this relationship in political thought and praxis. Why, when,

how did it evolve into such a

powerful element in apparatuses of global and local State power? Scholars such as Arun
Kundnani and Martin Thomas have examined aspects of the story of State surveillance and Islamophobia. But little
attention has been devoted to uncovering the intellectual origins of this
phenomenon in its full global and historical dimensions, which, arguably, cannot be
limited to the recent past. Islamophobia and Surveillance aims to remedy this neglect and start a
and where did the Islamophobic surveillance imperative emerge? And

new debate on this pressing issue. The symposium will consist of ten papers, and it is intended that they will be the
basis of a journal special-issue. Upon the finalisation of the programme, a full proposal will be submitted to Ethnic
and Racial Studies. Papers will be submitted and shared among participants prior to the meeting. The keynote
lecture will be given by Gil Anidjar, Professor in the Departments of Religion and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and
African Studies at Columbia University, and author of Blood: A Critique of Christianity (Columbia, 2014); Semites:
Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford, 2008); The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, 2003); and, Our
Place in al-Andalus: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters (Stanford, 2002).

2ac FrameworkTop

Note
Theres no formal 2ac to framework because there are a
variety of good approaches one of the first things you should
think through with this aff is how you want to frame the 1ac to
address framework and which selection of 2ac arguments
youd like to make. There is more than enough good evidence
here to get started

2ac Defense
The Aff meets it says several controversial status quo policies
should be eliminated in their entirety they get every
argument but the politics DA and state bad Ks. Thats a good
thing those args just encourage the neg to skirt the question
of islamophobia and recycle backfiles.
They still get the core of the topica huge link to the terror
DA, any surveillance good arguments, solvency arguments and
a huge variety of CPs, including the USFG CP, and Ks. If we
prove their ground is reasonable, predictable and desirable
you should vote neg you should prioritize scholarship to
challenge islamophobia over a DA that is almost worthless on
this topic anyways.

2ac C/I
Counter interpretation students should defend a world where
the USFG practices substantially less surveillance. We meet
we defend a world with substantially less USFG surveillance
the only difference is instead of forcing the affirmative to
defend change through an islamophobic institution we defend
change through student dissent.

2ac USFG
Their interp of the USFG sustains imperialism which is a major
terminal impact to the 1acours create an effective and
nuanced discussion of policy informed by history
Trofanenko 5 Professor in Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Brenda, On Defense of the Nation, The
Social Studies, Sep/Oct 2005, ProQuest, pgs. 196-197, RSpec)
The debates about the overwhelming problems, limitations, and disadvantages of social studies education noted in

Our more
pressing role as educators, in light of the Fordham report, is to discuss a more nuanced
understanding of the U.S. history. This would advance, as noted in La Pietra Report, an
understanding about the complexity and the contexts of relations and interactions,
including the ways in which they are infused with a variety of forms of power that define and result from the
the Fordham report attempt to reconcile and advance the idea of nation through a collective history.

interconnections of distinct but related histories (OAH 2000, 1). Taking the U.S. nation as only one example of

There is no
one experience of belonging to a nation, no single understanding or enactment of
sovereignty, and certainly no one meaning or experience of colonization or being
colonized. There is, then, a need for these issues to be realized and to be a part of
the questioning occurring within our classrooms. That would allow for the
substantial reframing of the basic narrative of U.S. history (OAH 2000, 2). Toward a
More Global Sense of the Nation Knowing how history is a site of political struggle, how we engage with
social studies education means emphasizing how power, processes, and
practices bear tangible effects on forging a national (and common) history by
reproducing and vindicating inclusions and exclusions. Such a critique
requires questioning how a singular, fixed, and static history celebrates the U.S. nation
and its place in the world as that common base of factual information about the American historical and
social analysis involves recognizing the meanings and conditions out of which nations are formed.

contemporary experience (27) argues for in the Fordham report. Our world history courses are central to defining,
understanding, and knowing not only other nations but also the position of each nation in relation to the United

The centrality that the west holds (notably the United States as an imperial power ) is
ingrained and willful in framing specific representations of the west that
normalize the imperial practices that established this nation. The role that the
United States holds on the world stage frequently remains unquestioned in social
studies classrooms. Certainly, we engage with various images and tropes to continue to advance how the
States.

colonialist past continues to remain present in our historical sensibilities. Moreover, the increasing number and
choices of archival sources function as a complement to further understanding the nation. If students are left to rely
on the variety of historical resources rather than question the use of such resources, then the most likely outcome
of their learning will be the reflection on the past with nostalgia that continues to celebrate myths and colonial
sensibility. To evaluate the history narrative now is to reconsider what it means and to develop a historical
consciousness in our students that goes beyond archival and nostalgic impulses associated with the formation of
the nation and U.S. nation building. We need to insist that the nation, and the past that has contributed to its

The nation as advanced in our

histories cannot be taken as the foundational grounds . The means by which the nation is
fashioned calls for examining the history through which nations are made and unmade. To admit the
participatory nature of knowledge and to invite an active and critical engagement with the world so that
students can come to question the authority of historical texts will, I hope, result in students realizing
that the classroom is not solely a place to learn about the nation and being a national, but rather a
place to develop a common understanding of how a nation is often formed
present day understanding, is simultaneously material and symbolic.

through sameness. We need to continue to question how a particular national history is necessary as an
educational function, but especially how that element has been, and remains, useful at specific times. My hope is to
extend the current critique of history within social studies, to move toward understanding why history and nation
still needs a place in social studies education. In understanding how the historicity of nation serves as the
ideological alibi of the territorial state (Appadurai 1996, 159) offers us a starting point. The challenge facing social
studies educators is how we can succeed in questioning nation, not by displacing it from center stage but by
considering how it is central. That means understanding how powerfully engrained the history of a nation is within
education and how a significant amount of learning is centered around the nation and its history. History is a forum
for assessing and understanding the study of change over time, which shapes the possibilities of knowledge itself.
We need to reconsider the mechanisms used in our own teaching, which need to be more than considering history
as a nostalgic reminiscence of the time when the nation was formed. We need to be questioning the contexts for
learning that can no longer be normalized through historys constituted purpose. The changing political and social
contexts of public history have brought new opportunities for educators to work through the tensions facing social

Increasing concerns with issues

of racism, equality, and the plurality of identities and histories mean that there
is no unified knowledge as the result of history, only contested subjects whose
multilayered and often contradictory voices and experiences intermingle with
partial histories that are presented as unified. This does not represent a problem,
but rather an opportunity for genuine productive study, discussion, and
learning.
studies education and its educational value to teachers and students.

2ac ROB
Who you are and what you think matters framework is a way
of a judge answering the question Who shall I be?
99% of debaters will never directly influence institutional
decision-making, but all of us will develop sharpen our ethical
views that guide how we respond to institutional violence and
how we think the government should or shouldnt act the
1acs scholarship challenges both the structural surveillance
policies that perpetuate islamophobia as well as challenging
the dominant Muslim tropes that sustain Western imperialism
Social change cannot be effected in the world unless there is a
vocabulary to construct subjects, i.e. how we emotively react
to the figure of Muslim ethical decision-making requires
attuning our ways of knowing to prevent the normalization of
the self that makes us complicit in the ongoing violence and
inequality perpetuated by racism only our affs interruption
can challenge the hidden violence of dominant knowledges
Scott 9 prof of philosophy @ Vanderbilt
(Charles, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 34: 350367, Foucault, Genealogy,
Ethics)
In Foucaults analysis of the May 1968 uprising in France, he said that even though
things were coming apart there did not exist any vocabulary capable of
expressing that process (Foucault, 2000, 271). We could say on Foucaults terms that there did
not exist a way of knowing (a subject of knowledge) and the language and
concepts suited for the complex event of Frances transformation. A momentous
event happened without adequate tools for its recognition, analysis, and appropriation.
Consequently, in the following dispersion of quarreling groups and political factions, the 1968 crisis did
not at first become an effective discursive event that opened up a full range
of apparent problems and transformations for formal knowledge. That would require a
knowing subject that was turned away from the strongest discursive options, such as those of the current
Humanists, Marxists, Maoists, French colonialists, and French cultural supremacists. So much was falling
apart in France at the time that a subject of knowledge was needed that formed in the
interconnecting French crises, a subject informed by marginal experiences in comparison to the
experiences recognized by the dominant discourses, marginalized experiences like
those of Algerian soldiers, French prisoners, people oppressed by French colonialism,
people hammered down by Stalins communism or the Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, and people in
highly energized, non-French cultures: a subject that developed with the voices and
experiences that were on the margins of the older and authoritative French way of life. In spite

May, 1968 opened an opportunity for

a new vocabulary, a new discourse, and a new ethos for recognizing and knowing. Its event
made possible a transitional and transformative knowing subject whose relative
freedom and lack of establishment constituted a major, constructive epistemic difference from
the accepted discourses. Much more could be said on this issue, but my present, limited points are that in
the context of Foucaults thought, transformation of the knowing subject constitutes an
ethical event; and ethics on an individual level takes place as people work
on themselves to be able to change themselves enough to know differently and to
of the stammering and stumbling in its aftermath, however,

transform what is evident about others (Foucault, 2000, 2412).14 These two kinds of transformation take place in

ethics are at work here.

One sense refers to ways of life that are constituted by discourses, institutions, and
practicesby all manner of power formations that are not authored by singular individuals and that are
ingrained in peoples lives inclusive of their judgment, knowledge, and codes of behavior. A society, of course,
can have a variety of overlapping or competing ways of life, a variety of ethical
environments, and changes in these environments would compose ethical changes in this broad sense of
ethical. The knowledge that genealogy generates comprises a different discourse from many established ones
genealogical knowing as Foucault conceives and practices it. Two different senses for

and puts in question many aspects of Western society, especially around the topics of madness, sex, crime,

challenges
significant parts of our social environment, encourages deliberation and critique,
and intends to make a differential impact on contemporary ways of life. In addition
to his writing, Foucault was active in many causes designed to change political and
social formations and to have a broad social impact. He played a leading role, for example, in support of
normalcy, social/political suppression of people, and mechanisms of regulation and control. It

Vietnamese boat people who were fleeing from persecution and being ignored by Western governments. He was
active in prison reform movements. He spoke out against what he found to be unacceptable injustices in Poland and
equally unacceptable silence in their regard in the West, against a Realpolitik that ignores suppression of people

passionate support of
institutional transformation and of suppressed and suffering people can be carried
out without Humanism or other forms of universalizing or totalizing discourse. A
second sense of ethics for Foucault means a work on the self by the self.15 He
understood, for example, his writing (and his interviews) as processes of self-formation: I
and their liberties in countries other than ones own. He showed in multiple ways that

havent written a single book that was not inspired, at least in part, by a direct personal experience, an experience
that he wants to understand better by finding a different vocabulary , changed combinations of
concepts, and the mutations they bring by connecting with aspects of experience that are barely emerging at the

His books, he says, compose experiences inclusive of his

own metamorphosis as he writes them and comes to a transformed connection with their topics.
He would also like for his books to provide readers with something akin to his
experience, to bring us to our limits of sense where transformations can occur (Foucault, 2000, 244). The sense
of ethics in this case is focused by individual experiences and the care they exercise in
connecting with them. In care for themselves, they work at maintaining or altering
their behavior and attitudes to appropriate themselves to their experiences.16 Foucault says that
his books are like invitations and public gestures to join in the books process, a process that he finds
transformative of aspects of contemporary life and potentially, should individuals join in,
transformative of the way they understand and connect with themselves (Foucault,
2000, 2456). Care for self has a very long lineage that Foucault spent his last years investigating.
borders of his awareness (Foucault, 2000, 244).

Indeed, understanding himself without metaphysical help or universalized solutions was one aspect of his caring

He carried out a project, deeply rooted in a Western tradition that makes caring for
oneself inseparable from the ways one knows oneself, the world, and others. In his
own process, he finds repeated instances of change in his self-world relation as he
experiences the impact of what he is coming to know at the borders of his
self-relation.

knowledge and identity. When these boundary-experiences (he calls them limit-experiences) occur, he
says, the clarity of some aspects of his identity dies in the impact of what he is coming to find. His affections
and behavior often change. As an author he attempts to write into his books these very processes for the
readers possible engagement. If I find through one of his books, for example, a way of knowing that
makes clear some of the dangers inherent in a well-established body of
knowledge or a mainstream institution, I have an opportunity for assessing those
dangers and choosing how I will connect with them and my experience of them. I might find
that what I know and the way I know are violated by what Foucaults work shows. I might find his
approach and the knowledge that it offers highly questionable or irrelevant for my life. I might experience
new questions, a need for change, an unexpected dissatisfaction with
what I have been accepting as true and good. If Foucaults works carry out their intention
and if I read them carefully, I am engaged in an experience that he found transformative and
that will make room for choices and problems that I can experience and that might bring me to an
edge where what I know meets a limit and the possibility for an altered discourse and
subjectivity. Coming in this way to an edge, a limit of the way I know and who I am in such
knowing brings together the epistemic and personal aspects of ethical experience.
The very act of caring for myself in this instance interrupts the subliminal processes of
normalization and sets in motion another kind of dynamics as I come to the limits of
my authorized experience and the emergence of a different kind of experience. I
am caring for myself, impacting my own affections, values, and way of knowing. The
dynamics of what Foucault calls biopower (the powerful complex of social forces that regulate human
behavior by means of, for example, health care delivery, education, and moral legislation in both broad and

are interrupted by a different dynamics that builds individual

autonomy. Self-caring instead of the anonymous dynamics of normalization begins to form my
selfs relation to itself. How will I appropriate the experience of limits and their transgression by emerging
voices, realities, and intensities? Who shall I be in their impact? How will I present myself to myself and
corpuscular ways)

my environment should I affirm what is happening in the margins of my established identity?

This is a comparatively more productive strategy than the

negs hubristic attempts to change the world only our
framework produces an ethical self that can create productive
micropolitics
Chandler 13 prof of IR @ Westminster
(The World of Attachment? The Post-humanist Challenge to Freedom and Necessity,
Millenium: Journal of International Studies, 41(3), 516 534)
The world of becoming thereby is an ontologically flat world without the traditional hierarchies of existence and a
more shared conception of agency. For Bennett, therefore, to begin to experience the relationship between persons
and other materialities more horizontally, is to take a step toward a more ecological sensibility.78 Here there is
room for human agency but this agency involves a deeper understanding of and receptivity to the world of objects

Rather than the hubristic focus on transforming the external

world, the ethico-political tasks are those of work on the self to erase hubristic liberal
traces of subject-centric understandings, understood to merely create the dangers
of existential resentment. Work on the self is the only route to changing the
world. As Connolly states: To embrace without deep resentment a world of becoming is to work to become who
you are, so that the word become now modifies are more than the other way around. Becoming who
you are involves the microtactics of the self, and work on the self can then
and object relations.

extend into micropolitics of more conscious and reflective choices and

decisions and lifestyle choices leading to potentially higher levels of
ethical self-reflectivity and responsibility. Bennett argues that against the narcissism of
anthropomorphic understandings of domination of the external world, we need some tactics for cultivating the

Rather than hubristically imagining that we can

shape the world we live in, Bennett argues that: Perhaps the ethical responsibility of
an individual human now resides in ones response to the assemblages in
which one finds oneself participating. Such ethical tactics include reflecting more on our
experience of our selves as vibrant matter.

relationship to what we eat and considering the agentic powers of what we consume and enter into an assemblage
with. In doing so, if an image of inert matter helps animate our current practice of aggressively wasteful and
planet-endangering consumption, then a materiality experienced as a lively force with agentic capacity could

the object to be changed or

transformed is the human the human mindset. By changing the way we think about the
world and the way we relate to it by including broader, more non-human or inorganic matter in our
considerations, we will have overcome our modernist attachment disorders and have
more ethically aware approaches to our planet. In cultivating these new
ethical sensibilities, the human can be remade with a new self and a new
self-interest.
animate a more ecologically sustainable public. For new materialists,

2ac Zine**
A framework which incorporates understanding and
interrogating islamophobia is critical to breaking down
systemic oppression and building a transformative pedagogy
Zine 12 (Jasmin Zine, a researcher studying Muslims in the Canadian diaspora.
She teaches graduate courses in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in
Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of
Toronto in the areas of race and ethnicity, anti-racism education and critical
ethnography.)(Anti-Islamophobia Education as Transformative Pedadogy:
Reflections from the Educational Front Lines, Oct. 17, 2012, The American Journal
of Islamic Social Sciences 21:3)//ASMITH
As an anti-racism scholar and educator, fellow colleagues and I realized from as
early as September 12 that there was an urgency to frame a critical pedagogical
response to address and challenge the rampant Islamophobia affecting the realities
of Muslims from all walks of life and social conditions. Among the most vulnerable
were children and youth, who received little support from schools in dealing with the
backlash that many were experiencing on a routine basis. Most schools were
reluctant to engage in any response beyond the politically neutral arena of crisis
management. Among the school districts that I was in contact with, there was a
clear resistance to addressing or even naming issues of racism and Islamophobia. In
fact, the discursive language to name and define the experiences that Muslims were
encountering on a day-to-day basis did not even exist within the educational
discourse. While schools were reluctant to name specific incidents as racism part
of an all-too-common denial the notion of Islamophobia did not have any
currency at all. In fact, it was not a part of the language or conceptual constructs
commonly used by educators, even by those committed to multicultural and
antiracist pedagogy. I realized the urgency to map a new epistemological and
pedagogical terrain by creating an educational framework for addressing
Islamophobia. Within the existing equity-based educational frameworks, one could
find the conceptual and pedagogical tools to address issues of racism, classism,
sexism, homophobia, ableism, and anti-Semitism. However, the discursive
foundations for dealing with Islamophobia and the accompanying educational
resources simply did not exist. Developing a new framework to fill this gap involved
coining a new term: Anti-Islamophobia Education. Being able to name and define
the experience of Muslims as the result of Islamophobia was critical to shaping the
kind of interventions that would take place from a critical educational standpoint.
Before outlining a methodology for conducting anti-Islamophobia education, it was
necessary to develop some discursive foundations, arrive at a definition of
Islamophobia, and create an understanding of what it was that we sought to
challenge and resist. From a socio-psychological standpoint, the notion of
Islamophobia is often loosely translated as an attitude of fear, mistrust, or hatred
of Islam and its adherents. However, this definition presents a narrow conceptual
framework and does not take into account the social, structural, and ideological
dimensions through which forms of oppression are operationalized and enacted.

Applying a more holistic analysis, far from being based on mere ignorance,
Islamophobic attitudes are, in fact, part of a rational system of power and
domination that manifests as individual, ideological, and systemic forms of
discrimination and oppression. The idea that discrimination, be it based on race,
class, gender, sexuality, ability, or religion, simply stems from ignorance allows
those engaged in oppressive acts and policies to claim a space of innocence. By
labeling Islamophobia as an essentially irrational fear, this conception denies the
logic and rationality of social dominance and oppression, which operates on multiple
social, ideological, and systemic levels. Therefore, to capture the complex
dimensions through which Islamophobia operates, it is necessary to extend the
definition from its limited conception as a fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims
and acknowledge that these attitudes are intrinsically linked to individual,
ideological, and systemic forms of oppression that support the logic and rationale of
specific power relations. For example, individual acts of oppression include such
practices as name-calling or personal assault, while systemic forms of oppression
refer to the structural conditions of inequality regulated through such institutional
practices as racial profiling or denying jobs or housing opportunities. These
exclusionary practices are shored up by specific ideological underpinnings, among
them the purveyed notions designed to pathologize Muslims as terrorists and
impending threats to public safety. Understanding the dimensions of how
systems of oppression such as Islamophobia operate socially,
ideologically, and systemically became a key component of developing
educational tools that would help build the critical skills needed to analyze
and challenge these dynamics. From a discursive standpoint, I locate antiIslamophobia education within a integrative anti-racism framework5 that views
systems of oppression based on race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and religion
as part of a multiple and interlocking nexus that reinforce and sustain one another.
Based on this understanding, I have mapped some key epistemological foundations
for anti-Islamophobia education.6 This includes the need to reclaim the stage
through which Islam is represented from the specter of terrorists and
suicide bombers to a platform of peace and social justice. Reclaiming the
stage requires adopting a pedagogical approach that shifts the popular media
discourse away from the negative, essentialized referents and tropes of abject
Otherness ascribed to Muslims. This move involves presenting a critical counternarrative in order to reframe the Manichean worldview and clash of civilizations
narratives typically being purveyed in order to present a more nuanced, reasoned,
and critical perspective of the global sociopolitical realities that Muslim individuals
and societies are confronting, engaging, and challenging. Another foundational
aspect of anti-Islamophobia education involves interrogating the systemic
mechanisms through which Islamophobia is reinforced, by analytically
unraveling the dynamics of power in society that sustain social inequality. Racial
profiling, which targets groups on the basis of their race, ethnicity, faith, or other
aspects of social difference, and similar issues are major systemic barriers that
criminalize and pathologize entire communities. In schools, the practice of colorcoded streaming, whereby a disproportionate number of racially and ethnically
marginalized youth are channeled into lower non-academic level streams, is another
example of institutionalized racism. Negative perceptions held by teachers and

guidance counselors toward racialized students have often led to assumptions of

failure or limited chances for success, based on such false stereotypes as the notion
that Islam doesnt value education for girls or Black students wont succeed.
These negative attitudes are relayed to students through the hidden curriculum of
schooling and lead to lower expectations being placed upon youth from specific
communities.7 Developing critical pedagogical tools to analyze and develop
challenges to these systems of domination is part of building a
transformative and liberatory pedagogy, one geared toward achieving greater
social justice in both schools and society. Another key goal of anti-Islamophobia
education involves the need to demystify stereotypes. Since 9/11, renewed
Orientalist constructions of difference have permeated the representation of
Muslims in media and popular culture. Images of fanatical terrorists and burqa-clad
women are seen as the primary markers of the Muslim world. Deconstructing and
demystifying these stereotypes is vital to helping students develop a critical literacy
of the politics of media and image-making. Critically examining the destructive
impact of how these images create the social and ideological divide between us
and them is important to exposing how power operates through the politics of
representation.

2ac Sequencing**
Its a sequencing question starting with dissent against the
government creates more effective and sustainable
institutional reform because it offers a safe haven to those
targeted by the current political order
Collins & Skover 13 (Collins & David ; Law at the Seattle University School of
Law, Undergrad, J.D. from Yale University. J.D. ; "Prologue." On Dissent: Its Meaning
in America. N.p.: Cambridge UP, 2013.Page XII. Print.
Dissent, it might be said, advances religious freedoms. When people of faith are permitted to
question prevailing beliefs, they stand to redefine the relationship between themselves and the Maker. This
spirit of moderation extinguishes the fires of heresy. Dissent, it might also be said,
contributes to the marketplace of ideas. It does this by promoting competition
among divergent viewpoints. The hope is that, in the battle of opinions, some form of truth will
prevail over falsehood, and the struggle will produce a more enlightened citizenry. Dissent,
it might further be said, enables self-governance by civic participation . Such participation
is a two-way street: it is the prerogative to agree or disagree with governmental action. When the governed
rule, they must have the right to differ from their governors . Dissent, it might be
said, checks governmental corruption or malfeasance, political power then comes
under public scrutiny. By raising citizen awareness, dissent might bring about
institutional reforms. Dissent might cultivate a democratic culture of tolerance, where all views are
suffered no matter how objectionable they may be. Democracy is diversity, and the diversity of views is often born
out of dissent. One measure of a thriving democracy is the extent to which it fosters vibrant dissent. Finally, it might

a culture of dissent secures a safe haven for the outsider. When

individuals no longer fear the censure simply for being different, they can give
public voice to their private views. Thereby, dissenters are afforded a chance to
expand the behavioral boundaries of their society .
also be said that

Legal change before social change is doomed to fail saying

that government should end its efforts while working to
transform society is the best method
Iyer 15 (Deepa Iyer. Senior fellow at The Center for Social Inclusion. Law Alone
Cant Dismantle Islamophobia. February 20, 2015.
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/2/law-alone-cant-dismantleislamophobia.html)//EMerz
Legal efforts will be only partly effective if we do not confront the culture
that allows hate violence to chafe and fester. All these incidents occurred in the
two months leading up to the Chapel Hill shootings. The cumulative effect is
overwhelming. In the week after the tragedy, communities around the country have
reported other acts of violence and vandalism. Someone spray-painted racial slurs
such as pigs and Now this is a hate crime on the doors of the Islamic School of
Rhode Island. In Dearborn, Michigan, police are investigating two white mens
assault of an Arab man who was with his daughter in the parking lot of a Kroger
grocery store. In Bothell, Washington, leaders of a Hindu temple found a swastika
and Get out spray-painted on a wall, and a nearby junior high school was

vandalized with Muslims get out. Without systemic solutions and practices
that challenge and change the culture and climate of hostility toward
Muslim, Arab, Sikh and South Asian communities, efforts to counter hate
violence through only legal solutions will not stick. The federal government
can do its part. It can jump-start the Interagency Initiative on Hate Crimes, which
the White House announced in November 2014 and include a focus on Muslim, Arab
and South Asian communities, given the ongoing violence targeting them .
Government agencies must cease unwarranted surveillance and profiling
of those communities. These practices are at odds with the governments
commitment to enforce civil rights laws and will lead only to greater mistrust. State
and local legislators can introduce bills that set up local government and community
rapid response mechanisms to address acts of hate and hold formal sessions to
hear directly from community members and leaders. Politicians must abide by a
code of civility and hold one another accountable for racist and xenophobic rhetoric.
Philanthropic stakeholders can invest in the efforts of community-based
organizations that are often at the front lines of responding to the heightened sense
of alarm that their constituents experience. Fostering a climate based on mutual
understanding and respect of the multiracial communities we are fast becoming in
America will take vigilance from each of us. It starts with a better understanding of
one anothers stories, histories and experiences, with the intention of finding
common threads and identifying one anothers humanity. Civic, faith, education and
business leaders, in partnership with artists and cultural bridge builders, can create
spaces and opportunities that allow people to engage in dialogue with one another.
We can learn from movements such as #BlackLivesMatter that have allowed us to
have honest national conversations about how people of color experience violence
and discrimination. We must continue to address hate violence through effective
tracking, prosecution and interagency coordination. But these efforts will be only
partly effective if we do not confront the culture one that is nearly 14 years
old that allows hate violence to chafe and fester. We must do this for Deah
Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha and all
the other people we have lost. We must do it so that we can stop adding names to a
list that is already too long and painful for our families, communities and nation to
hold.

2ac Student Activism

Protest is the best form of deliberation and student action is
critical state approaches to challenging surveillance only
result in more surveillance moves that depoliticize and destroy
student activism the aff is a form of consciousness raising
that is vital to avoid their hopeless belief in institutional
reform
Asmail, 14 Asmail, Juman. Palestinian student activist. co-founder of
Southampton Students for Palestine and is interested in the universal struggle for
justice. "Student Activism Is Being Sabotaged and This Is Why It Matters."
OpenDemocracy. Creative Commons Attribution, 12 Sept. 2014. Web Janai
students consciousness of their duty towards humanity, towards their fellow oppressed students in
made a meaningful contribution towards social change . As Nelson
Mandela said, To be free is not merely to cast off ones chains, but to live in a way
that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The students who were dedicated to the
Barclays campaign were truly committed to respecting and enhancing the freedom of the tyrannized . They
consciously upheld human worth and dignity . Today, however, politicians and the
police are deliberately attempting to depoliticize student unions and repress student
activism. Research conducted by the Institute of Policy Research (IPR) at the
University of Bath showed that political campaigns run by student activists are not
only targeted by the police but also by corporate security intelligence. Deplorable tactics
It was

South Africa, that

have been employed, such as group infiltrations, data gathering and campaign manipulation. This repression was
starkly displayed after the infamous 2010 increase in university tuition fees to 9,000 a year, provoking an angry
crowd to storm the Conservative Party HQ at Westminster. While cuts to university funding may have been the
immediate catalyst for action, the protesters' reasons were complex. Student mobilisation was a mass rejection of
the government's higher education agenda in its entirety, from privatisation of university facilities to poor wages
and staff redundancies. It was an act of honesty and genuine concern in the face of policy that was gambling with
the education system. The upsurge in 2010 took the police by surprise but in the following years incidents of violent
repression became common. Mass arrests, kettling and other disproportionate tactics deterred many students from
exercising proactive citizenship in bettering student activism on and off campus. 2013 saw some important campusbased actions, such as occupations and sit-ins at the University of Sussex and the University of London, for
example. As Areeb Ullah, education vice president at Kings College London students' union, explains: The purpose
of the Senate House occupation was to protest against the closure of the University of London Union and the selling
off of the student loans to private companies." Witnesses reported police violence in bringing an end to the Senate
House occupation. Additionally, management at the University of Sussex suspended and excluded five students
from campus for taking action against campus facilities privatisation and for standing in solidarity with striking staff
across the country. The incident that struck me most was the blunt attempt of Cambridgeshire police to recruit a
young activist to become a paid informant for spying on student activists. Video footage of the incident was
captured by the activist and uploaded onto the internet. The officer was recorded asking the activist to target
student-union type stuff for the purposes of security intelligence. In the video, the officer goes on to explain that
such targets may be anti-fascist and environmentalist groups as well as campaigns concerned with government
cuts and accountability for tax avoidance. One of the key findings of the IPR research states: Undermining
campaigners is essentially undermining democracy. The examples of corporate spying and strategising in Secret
Manoeuvres raise concerns about the engineering of consent.... Deliberative democracy requires the participation
of civil society, but if activists and campaigns are sabotaged then the terms on which political and policy decisions
are made is called into question."The initial, most important step towards combating the sabotage of student

Raising consciousness could

strengthen the struggle against depolicisation , and rescue student activism. Firstly, when students
activism is awareness as to the stakes threatened by such attempts.

are targeted with the aim of inhibiting their political and social influence then democracy and liberty are both at
risk. This is not only due to the active role of students in shaping social and political change but also because if one
group of the community was successfully targeted there is no reason why another group will not be targeted in the
same manner. Secondly, universities by their very nature are hubs of knowledge and enlightenment. Any hindering

of the practical application of such awareness and knowledge is in its very best a form of doublethink and in its
worst a betrayal of education. Students attend university to broaden their perspectives, to think differently and
critically and to contribute to the advancement of society by transforming theoretical knowledge into practice. If
governments publically claim that this is the aim of universities but then seek to limit their influence, then the very
purpose of an educational establishment is defeated. Thirdly, the atomization of society is a manifestation of
divide and conquer. When governments misguide individuals over the core issues threatening society, we
become self-interested, working solely in pursuit of egocentric motives and giving the powerful carte blanche in
relation to public affairs. Different groups must continue to form coalitions and strong solidarity networks to
strengthen the current of political and social influence. Another broad step is to look at forms of practical solidarity
and action on the ground. Such actions may include discussing matters in public forums, mass protests, picketing
and leafleting to influence public opinion, lobbying with MPs to exert pressure on government policies, and forming
coalitions with interested groups. All these actions require consciousness, self-awareness, and change of personal

The belief in our own power

to make meaningful contributions and to channel this energy positively is a critical
factor in materializing our aspirations. When we aspire for justice, we must
hold the firm belief that we can make justice possible. Politicization is a
necessary component of citizenship to protest is to exercise citizenship. The
continued campaign to depoliticize students and hamper student activism,
eventually leading to the impediment of the momentum of our youth, is a great loss
not only to students but the good of society as a whole.
perceptions, all leading to a belief in our ability to actually make a change.

Student Activism in fact can change the world Soweto

Student Uprising resulted in the beginning of the Fall of the
Apartheid Regime and sparked global
Sesay, 10 Sesay, Isha. 360 Bulletin on Anderson Cooper 360. Journalist"The
Image That Changed the Course of South Africa's History." CNN. Cable News
Network, 16 June 2010. Web.
grabbed the world's attention and helped change the course of
South African history. Thirty-four years ago Wednesday, on June 16, 1976, thousands of black
school children in Soweto, South Africa, took to the streets to protest the apartheid
education system that obliged them to be taught in Afrikaans . It was supposed to be
a peaceful protest, but the students were met with police gunfire and at least 23 of
them were killed. One of the first youths to be killed was 12-year-old Hector Pieterson. His death was captured in a
It's the iconic image that

photograph that came to define South Africa's liberation struggle. In the image a fellow student carries Hector, with his 17-year-old
sister Antoinette Sithole at his side. For Sithole, the events of that day are still fresh in her memory. "The

demonstration
was meant for high school and secondary schools only, not the younger ones, " Sithole
told CNN. "But on the day, as we're protesting with pride, holding placards, singing and
chanting, at some point we find younger ones. "All of a sudden there was a shot. Everybody ran amok in
confusion, running for cover, dashing into other people's homes. During that hide-and-seek I saw my younger brother on the
opposite side of the pavement. "There was another shot, so we had to go back into hiding and unfortunately we went two separate
ways. When I came back to the pavement he was nowhere to be seen." Then, Sithole saw a crowd of students gathered around a
man who was carrying a child. "The first thing that I spotted was my brother's shoes, so I quickly ran to the scene and joined them in
running," she said. "So we're running and I'm trying to explain myself: 'This is my brother, who are you? Where are you taking him?'
The man never said anything. "Then I saw blood coming from the side of the mouth and I panicked. My voice was harder -- 'who are

The shooting sparked off days

of protests known as the Soweto uprisings, which many regard as the beginning of
the end of the apartheid regime.
you, can't you see my brother's head?' He never said anything, just keep running."

2ac No Agency
Framework is built on the liberal multiculturalist presumption
that Muslim-Americans have political agency and institutional
power they dont, and whenever they even come close to
attaining it theyre labeled terrorists and investigated
Guttman, 12Nathan, The Truth? Few Muslims in Government, Forward,
http://forward.com/news/160354/the-truth-few-muslims-in-government/ --BR
When Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann and a group of colleagues
called for a probe into security concerns over the employment of several Muslims
in top government positions, Democrats and Republicans joined in condemning the
call and in accusing those behind it of Islamophobia. Yet, shining the spotlight on
the issue of Muslim Americans in senior federal government positions also revealed
a little-noticed truth: There arent many of them. In fact, less than a handful of
Muslims hold top posts, and in general, activists believe, Muslim Americans are
underrepresented in the civil service. Most Muslims in government are at the more
junior levels, said Haris Tarin, Washington office director of the Muslim Public Affairs
Council. There is no one in Cabinet level, no one at the deputy secretary level.
Muslims in America have been growing in numbers over the past decade. According
to a recent study by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies,
2.6 million Muslims were living in America in 2010. This is roughly in line with a
study produced by the Pew Research Center last year that also found that 63% of
American Muslims were first-generation immigrants. Yet, Muslims in senior federal
positions are still a rarity. Currently, the most noted ones in the Obama
administration include Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton (and wife of former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner); Rashad
Hussain, who is Americas special envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation,
and Farah Pandith, the State Departments special representative to Muslim
communities. Two out of 535 members of Congress are also Muslim, both
Democrats: Keith Ellison of Minnesota, and Indianas Andr Carson. Several other
Muslims serve on federal advisory boards, including Dalia Mogahed, who advised
the White House office of faith-based and neighborhood initiatives, and Mohamed
Elibiary, who has consulted for the Department of Homeland Security. On the state
level, high-level Muslim appointments can also be a controversial issue. Last year,
New Jerseys governor, Chris Christie, appointed Sohail Mohammed to be the states
first Muslim Superior Court judge, but only after facing down a hail of charges from
conservatives in his own base that Mohammed would bring Sharia, or Islamic
religious law, into American courts. Sharia law has nothing to do with this at all. Its
crazy! Christie declared at an August 2011 press conference. Bachmanns call for a
probe of several federal officials of Muslim faith was delivered via a series of letters
she and fellow Republicans Trent Franks, Louie Gohmert, Thomas Rooney and Lynn
Westmoreland sent on June 13 to the inspectors general of the departments of
State, Homeland Security, Defense and Justice, and to the director of National
Intelligence. The letters asked the inspectors to investigate the appointees alleged
ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. These accusations were based on a report compiled

by Frank Gaffney, who was a top Pentagon official during the Reagan administration.
Bachmann and her colleagues focused especially on Abedin, who, according to the
letter sent to State Departments inspector general, has three family members
connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives. The letter also claimed that the
State Department has adopted a policy favorable toward the Muslim Brotherhood,
indirectly suggesting that this policy could be a result of Abedins alleged family ties
to the organization. No official response from the inspectors general has been made
public. But CNN reported that IGs at the Departments of State and of Homeland
Security had rejected Bachmanns request as being outside their mandate, which is
to examine the effectiveness of government programs and to prevent fraud and
waste. Shail Khan, a former political appointee in the George W. Bush White House,
had a similar experience while working in government. Khan served in the Office of
Public Liaison from Bushs first day in office and until the end of his term. During this
time, he was attacked by Frank J. Gaffney, who heads the conservative Center for
Security Policy, for his familys Islamist connections. They tried to question my
loyalty, Khan said in an interview, but people like Huma Abedin and like me, who
passed serious security clearance, are not a threat. Khan now tries to encourage
young Muslim Americans, in the administration and on Capitol Hill, not to give up on
public service. These things discourage patriotic Americans from serving in
government, Khan said, adding that in recent years he succeeded in convincing
several Muslim staffers to remain in government. After the most recent episode, the
Congress members who signed the letters to the inspectors general particularly
Bachmann, a former presidential candidate were widely condemned by faith
groups and politicians, including some leading Republicans. Arizona Senator John
McCain called the accusations directed at Muslim American administration officials
sinister and said they need to stop now. But other Republicans, including House
Majority Leader Eric Cantor, refused to criticize Bachmann and her colleagues.
Activists in the Muslim-American community said that the letters and the public
questioning of Muslim federal employees loyalty could further discourage young
members of the community who are considering a government career. If this kind
of McCarthyism continues, there is a real fear that people who are very smart and
can make a lot of money elsewhere will stay outside of public service, Tarin said.
Still, Muslim community leaders broadly agreed that anti-Muslim sentiments are not
the sole factor driving Muslims away from senior government positions. Another
obstacle facing Muslim Americans, as well as Arab Americans who are Christians, is
climbing the ranks in government offices dealing with Middle East policy. The one
area that remains problematic for Arab Americans is anything that has to do with
Middle East policy, said James Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American
Institute. It is easier for a Dennis Ross to get a job than it is for an Arab American ,
he added, referring to President Obamas former top aide on Middle East issues,
who is Jewish and has served as chairman of a Jerusalem-based think tank
sponsored by the Jewish Agency. Zogbys son, Joseph Zogby, was among the few
Arab Americans who served in the State Departments Bureau of Near Eastern
Affairs. During his time there, the young Zogby constantly came under attack from
some pro-Israel activists.

Islamophobia means political office is inaccessible to Muslims

because theyll never get elected gotta put the horse before
the cart
Braman and Sinno 9 (Eileen Braman and Abdulkader H. Sinno. An
Experimental Investigation of Causal Attributions for the Political Behavior of Muslim
Candidates: Can a Muslim Represent you? 2009.
http://www.sinno.com/Papers/Braman%20%26%20Sinno.%202009.%20Politics
%20%26%20 Religion.%20Can%20a%20Muslim%20Represent%20you.pdf. Page
248)//EMerz
It is puzzling that the United States, a country whose political culture emphasizes
diversity and immigrant roots, produces so few elected Muslim officials while the
populations of several European nation states with disadvantaged and marginalized
Muslim populations elect Muslims to their national parliaments and to the European
parliament at rates that sometimes approximate, or even exceed, their proportion in
the general population (Haddad 2002, 2004). One likely explanation for this puzzle
is that a segment of the society has attitudes toward Muslims making it difficult for
them to get elected in the large First Past the Post (FPTP) districts of the United
States (Sinno 2009). In other countries, this may be less of an obstacle. Proportional
Representation has aided the prospect of Muslim representation in Europe and the
concentration of Muslim-Canadians and British Muslims in some single-member
districts has facilitated the election of Muslim candidates in these countries. An
American Muslim, however, cannot realistically hope to gain office with the support
of only Muslim voters. Congress generally reflects the religious composition of
Judeo- Christian religious groups in society quite well for denominations with 1% or
more of the population. The number of Muslims in the United States has increased
dramatically since the 1970s. Muslims now make up to 2% of the total United States
population and enjoy much larger concentrations in some urban areas;1 yet there
have been no Muslim representatives in the national legislature until just recently.
Muslims are also underrepresented in state politics. Currently, there are no Muslim
governors or lieutenant governors, and only five state legislators are Muslims. The
110th Congress, elected in November 2006, included one Muslim (Keith Ellison) and
two Buddhists for the first time. A second Muslim, Andre Carson was elected to the
110th Congress in a special election in March 2008. Figure 1 plots the proportion of
members of the 110th Congress from religious groups that are comparable in size to
the Muslim community (between 0.5 and 5% of the United States population) versus
the proportion of Adherents from those groups in American society.

Their view of debate presumes that the state is a safe place for
Muslim activists challenging Islamophobia first is the only
way to challenge the chilling effect that suppresses political
agency
Fisher 4. (Linda E. Fisher. Associate Professor of Law and Director, Center for
Social Justice, Seton Hall Law School. Guilt by Expressive Association: Political
Profiling, Surveillance, and the Privacy of Groups p. 623-624.
http://www.arizonalawreview.org/pdf/46-4/46arizlrev621.pdf)// EMerz

Politically motivated surveillance such as that previously engaged in by the FBI

raises serious First Amendment concerns, including potential violations of
associational rights. When investigations focus not on legitimate law enforcement
purposes but rather on subjects First Amendment conduct,14 fundamental yet
fragile constitutional rights are abridged.15 One could accurately dub this
phenomenon political profiling.16 This form of profiling relies on guilt by
association and is simply not an effective law enforcement technique.17 Targets of
political surveillance typically report being chilled in the exercise of their
rights to engage in free speech and the free exercise of religion. And,
suffering actual or potential damage to their reputations, they change their
behavior accordingly.18 Many citizens and lawful residents are reluctant to
engage in First Amendment conduct if that activity will result in an FBI file
branding them as extremists or terrorists. And in the most extreme cases,
information gathered can be used to destroy organizations and lives.19

2ac Language/Reps 1st

Dehumanization of foreign populations establishes horrific
material conditions of violencethe way we conceive of and
discuss foreign bodies matters
Collins and Glover 2 (John Collins, Ass. Prof. of Global Studies at St. Lawrence,
and Ross Glover, Visiting Professor of Sociology at St. Lawrence University, 2002,
Collateral Language, p. 6-7, The Real Effects of Language)
As any university student knows, theories about the social construction and social effects of language have

Conservative critics often argue that those

who use these theories of language (e.g., deconstruction) are just talking about language,
as opposed to talking about the real world. The essays in this book, by contrast, begin from the
premise that language matters in the most concrete, immediate way possible: its
use, by political and military leaders, leads directly to violence in the form of war,
mass murder (including genocide), the physical destruction of human commu nities,
and the devastation of the natural environment. Indeed, if the world ever witnesses a
nuclear holocaust, it will probably be because leaders in more than one country have
succeeded in convincing their people, through the use of political language, that the
use of nuclear weapons and, if necessary, the destruction of the earth itself, is
justifiable. From our perspective, then, every act of political violencefrom the horrors perpetrated
become a common feature of academic scholarship.

against Native Americans to the murder of political dissidents in the Soviet Union to the destruction of the World
Trade Center, and now the bombing of Afghanistanis

intimately linked with the use of language .

Partly what we are talking about here, of course, are the processes of manufacturing
consent and shaping peoples perception of the world around them; people are
more likely to support acts of violence committed in their name if the
recipients of the violence have been defined as terrorists , or if the
violence is presented as a defense of freedom. Media analysts such as Noam Chomsky
have written eloquently about the corrosive effects that this kind of process has on the political culture of supposedly democratic societies. At the risk of stating the obvious, however, the most fundamental effects of violence

the language that shapes public opinion is

the same language that burns villages, besieges entire populations, kills and maims
human bodies, and leaves the ground scarred with bomb craters and littered with
land mines. As George Orwell so famously illustrated in his work, acts of violence can easily be
made more palatable through the use of euphemisms such as pacification or, to use
an example discussed in this book, targets. It is important to point out, however, that the need for such
language derives from the simple fact that the violence itself is abhorrent. Were it
not for the abstract language of vital interests and surgical strikes and the flattering language of
civilization and just wars, we would be less likely to avert our mental gaze from the
physical effects of violence.
are those that are visited upon the objects of violence;

2ac DSRB
Plan focus creates a form of spectator mentality which
absolves us of responsibility of solving real world issues
Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley 8 (Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, Rhetoric PhD & Prof @
Pitt, THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS
NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE)

the stance of the policymaker in debate comes with a sense of

detachment associated with the spectator posture .115 In other words, its participants
are able to engage in debates where they are able to distance themselves from the
events that are the subjects of debates. Debaters can throw aro und terms like
torture, terrorism, genocide and nuclear war without blinking. Debate simulations
can only serve to distance the debaters from real world participation in the political
contexts they debate about. As William Shanahan remarks: the topic established a
relationship through interpellation that inhered irrespective of what the particular
political affinities of the debaters were. The relationship was both political and
ethical, and needed to be debated as such. When we blithely call for United States
Federal Government policymaking, we are not immune to the colonialist legacy that
establishes our place on this continent. We cannot wish away the horrific atrocities
perpetrated everyday in our name simply by refusing to acknowledge these
implications (emphasis in original).116 The objective stance of the policymaker is an
impersonal or imperialist persona. The policymaker relies upon acceptable forms
of evidence, engaging in logical discussion, producing rational thoughts . As Shanahan,
and the Louisville debaters note, such a stance is integrally linked to the normative,
historical and contemporary practices of power that produce and maintain varying
networks of oppression. In other words, the discursive practices of policy-oriented
debate are developed within, through and from systems of power and privilege.
Thus, these practices are critically implicated in the maintenance of hegemony . So,
Mitchell observes that

rather than seeing themselves as government or state actors, Jones and Green choose to perform themselves in
debate, violating the more objective stance of the policymaker and require their opponents to do the same.

Framework XT/A2

A2 C/I = Unlimited
Our counter-interpretation places a pretty clear limit it forces
the Aff to defend a world with substantially less US
surveillance
Reject reductionist rants about lazy K debaters finding new
ways to cheat we place clear limits on that and theyre only
responsible for debating our 1ac its only about surveillance,
takes a controversial statement regarding US policy action and
doesnt rely on cheap tricks if they couldnt debate that its
their fault, not ours

A2 Critical Thinking**
The role of the academic is to speak truth to power, not tell the
government what they should do they shut down critical
thinking and deliberation
Steele, 10 Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas
(Brent, Defacing Power: The Aesthetics of Insecurity in Global Politics pg 130-132,
dml) [gender/ableist language modified with brackets]
When facing these dire warnings regarding the manner in which academicintellectuals are seduced by power, what prospects exist for parrhesia? How can
academic-intellectuals speak truth to power? It should be noted, first, that the
academic-intellectuals primary purpose should not be to re-create a program to
replace power or even to develop a research program that could be employed by
students of world politics, as Robert Keohane (1989: 173) once advised the legions
of the International Studies Association. Because academics are denied the full
truth from the powerful, Foucault states, we must avoid a trap into which
governments would want intellectuals to fall (and often they do): Put yourself in
our place and tell us what you would do. This is not a question in which one
has to answer. To make a decision on any matter requires a knowledge of the facts
refused us, an analysis of the situation we arent allowed to make. Theres the
trap. (2001: 453) 27 This means that any alternative order we might provide, this
hypothetical research program of our own, will also become imbued with authority
and used for mechanisms of control, a matter I return to in the concluding
chapter of this book. When linked to a theme of counterpower, academicintellectual parrhesia suggests, instead, that the academic should use his or her
pulpit, their position in society, to be a friend who plays the role of a
parrhesiastes, of a truth-teller (2001: 134). 28 When speaking of then-president
Lyndon Johnson, Morgenthau gave a bit more dramatic and less amiable take that
contained the same sense of urgency. What the President needs, then, is an
intellectual father-confessor, who dares to remind him[/her] of the brittleness of
power, of its arrogance and blindness [ignorance], of its limits and pitfalls; who
tells him[/her] how empires rise, decline and fall, how power turns to folly, empires
to ashes. He[/she] ought to listen to that voice and tremble. (1970: 28) The
primary purpose of the academic-intellectual is therefore not to just effect a
moment of counterpower through parrhesia, let alone stimulate that heroic process
whereby power realizes the error of its ways. So those who are skeptical that
academics ever really, regarding the social sciences, make that big of a difference
are missing the point. As we bear witness to what unfolds in front of us and
collectively analyze the testimony of that which happened before us, the purpose of
the academic is to tell the story of what actually happens, to document and
faithfully capture both historys events and context. The intellectuals of America,
Morgenthau wrote, can do only one thing: live by the standard of truth that is their
peculiar responsibility as intellectuals and by which men of power will ultimately be
judged as well (1970: 28). This will take time, 29 but if this happens, if we seek to
uncover and practice telling the truth free from the tact, rules, and seduction

that constrain its telling, then, as Arendt notes, humanly speaking, no more is
required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a
place fit for human habitation ([1964] 2006: 233).

A2 Deliberation Good
**note also in 2ac student activism**
Protest is the best form of deliberation and student action is
critical state approaches to challenging surveillance only
result in more surveillance moves that depoliticize and destroy
student activism the aff is a form of consciousness raising
that is vital to avoid their hopeless belief in institutional
reform
Asmail, 14 Asmail, Juman. Palestinian student activist. co-founder of
Southampton Students for Palestine and is interested in the universal struggle for
justice. "Student Activism Is Being Sabotaged and This Is Why It Matters."
OpenDemocracy. Creative Commons Attribution, 12 Sept. 2014. Web Janai
students consciousness of their duty towards humanity, towards their fellow oppressed students in
made a meaningful contribution towards social change . As Nelson
Mandela said, To be free is not merely to cast off ones chains, but to live in a way
that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The students who were dedicated to the
Barclays campaign were truly committed to respecting and enhancing the freedom of the tyrannized . They
consciously upheld human worth and dignity . Today, however, politicians and the
police are deliberately attempting to depoliticize student unions and repress student
activism. Research conducted by the Institute of Policy Research (IPR) at the
University of Bath showed that political campaigns run by student activists are not
only targeted by the police but also by corporate security intelligence. Deplorable tactics
It was

South Africa, that

have been employed, such as group infiltrations, data gathering and campaign manipulation. This repression was
starkly displayed after the infamous 2010 increase in university tuition fees to 9,000 a year, provoking an angry
crowd to storm the Conservative Party HQ at Westminster. While cuts to university funding may have been the
immediate catalyst for action, the protesters' reasons were complex. Student mobilisation was a mass rejection of
the government's higher education agenda in its entirety, from privatisation of university facilities to poor wages
and staff redundancies. It was an act of honesty and genuine concern in the face of policy that was gambling with
the education system. The upsurge in 2010 took the police by surprise but in the following years incidents of violent
repression became common. Mass arrests, kettling and other disproportionate tactics deterred many students from
exercising proactive citizenship in bettering student activism on and off campus. 2013 saw some important campusbased actions, such as occupations and sit-ins at the University of Sussex and the University of London, for
example. As Areeb Ullah, education vice president at Kings College London students' union, explains: The purpose
of the Senate House occupation was to protest against the closure of the University of London Union and the selling
off of the student loans to private companies." Witnesses reported police violence in bringing an end to the Senate
House occupation. Additionally, management at the University of Sussex suspended and excluded five students
from campus for taking action against campus facilities privatisation and for standing in solidarity with striking staff
across the country. The incident that struck me most was the blunt attempt of Cambridgeshire police to recruit a
young activist to become a paid informant for spying on student activists. Video footage of the incident was
captured by the activist and uploaded onto the internet. The officer was recorded asking the activist to target
student-union type stuff for the purposes of security intelligence. In the video, the officer goes on to explain that
such targets may be anti-fascist and environmentalist groups as well as campaigns concerned with government
cuts and accountability for tax avoidance. One of the key findings of the IPR research states: Undermining
campaigners is essentially undermining democracy. The examples of corporate spying and strategising in Secret
Manoeuvres raise concerns about the engineering of consent.... Deliberative democracy requires the participation
of civil society, but if activists and campaigns are sabotaged then the terms on which political and policy decisions
are made is called into question."The initial, most important step towards combating the sabotage of student

Raising consciousness could

strengthen the struggle against depolicisation , and rescue student activism. Firstly, when students
activism is awareness as to the stakes threatened by such attempts.

are targeted with the aim of inhibiting their political and social influence then democracy and liberty are both at
risk. This is not only due to the active role of students in shaping social and political change but also because if one

group of the community was successfully targeted there is no reason why another group will not be targeted in the
same manner. Secondly, universities by their very nature are hubs of knowledge and enlightenment. Any hindering
of the practical application of such awareness and knowledge is in its very best a form of doublethink and in its
worst a betrayal of education. Students attend university to broaden their perspectives, to think differently and
critically and to contribute to the advancement of society by transforming theoretical knowledge into practice. If
governments publically claim that this is the aim of universities but then seek to limit their influence, then the very
purpose of an educational establishment is defeated. Thirdly, the atomization of society is a manifestation of
divide and conquer. When governments misguide individuals over the core issues threatening society, we
become self-interested, working solely in pursuit of egocentric motives and giving the powerful carte blanche in
relation to public affairs. Different groups must continue to form coalitions and strong solidarity networks to
strengthen the current of political and social influence. Another broad step is to look at forms of practical solidarity
and action on the ground. Such actions may include discussing matters in public forums, mass protests, picketing
and leafleting to influence public opinion, lobbying with MPs to exert pressure on government policies, and forming
coalitions with interested groups. All these actions require consciousness, self-awareness, and change of personal

The belief in our own power

to make meaningful contributions and to channel this energy positively is a critical
factor in materializing our aspirations. When we aspire for justice, we must
hold the firm belief that we can make justice possible. Politicization is a
necessary component of citizenship to protest is to exercise citizenship. The
continued campaign to depoliticize students and hamper student activism,
eventually leading to the impediment of the momentum of our youth, is a great loss
not only to students but the good of society as a whole.
perceptions, all leading to a belief in our ability to actually make a change.

A2 Institutional Education
The aff is a discussion of institutional policy and how we best
effect it the plan text defends institutional reform and the
1ac and our 2ac evidence defends student dissent as a means
of producing it

A2 IR Education Good
Excluding divergent spaces outside of orthodox approaches to
knowledge leads to domination turns their education args
Rajaram 02. (Prem Kumar Rajaram, Alternatives: Global, Local, Politica.l JulySept 2002. v27 i3 pg 351 (22))//EMerz
the pseudoscientific
epistemology employed by the orthodox perspective on international relations
renders invisible a myriad "subaltern" peoples. (I) The propensity of scholarly and political
One of the central aims of the recent critical turn in IR theory has been to show that

work in this area has been to deduce central characteristics of the international realm--agents and forces that
then structure and limit further thinking on the subject. This deduction does not occur objectively. How one
conceives of oneself and others will determine what one sees and, very importantly, what one does not see. This is a
familiar argument, a familiar cry of poststructural, postcolonial, and feminist critiques of the epistemology of
international relations as a scholarly discipline as they insist on the important constitutive role of culture, class,
gender, history, and geography in our senses of ourselves. I am similarly interested here in the epistemology,
the account of a proper scholarly understanding and the methods it enables, that has contributed to these

the claims of
this epistemology are dependent on an ongoing exclusion of other ways of
understanding; and, second, to introduce Theodor Adorno's account of the "aesthetic understanding"
blind spots, where the subalterns of international relations would fit. I want, first, to show that

through which he attempts to address the ideological commitments behind exclusionary epistemologies and to

The compartmentalization, codification, and

watering down of experience, Adorno suggests, depends on the suppression of those
qualities of the human being that would resist pseudoscientific quantification. The
suggest a revised account of knowledge.

expansion of the meaning of "knowledge" enabled by an aesthetic understanding involves highlighting the
"sensuous," precisely those resistant qualities of the individual that remain after the violence of naming and
categorizing. Aesthetic understanding makes note of the sensuous, the nonrational that is so oftendismissed as

Orthodox forms of IR theory,

this argument implies, should not presume to claim certain knowledge of structures and
processes into which conceptions of ethics and politics must be made to fit, for the
excess of the sensuous that which cannot be rationally codified, always puts into
doubt the secure conclusions that the theory of international relations works to
affirm as a practice of exclusions.
merely irrational and that cannot be exhausted by rational codification.

A2 Law = Neutral
Law is not static it is a political tool that can be changed to
suit the needs of the dominant class
Elver, 12 Professor of Global Studies at Cal Berkeley (Hilal, " TEN YEARS AFTER
9/11: RETHINKING COUNTERTERRORISM: Racializing Islam Before and After 9/11:
From Melting Pot to Islamophobia", in Transnational Law and Contemporary
Problems Vol. 21 Issue 119, p. 7//ejh)
My personal experience in the United States helped me gradually understand the
deep and complex relationship between racial politics, various forms of
discrimination, the very important role of the legal system, and the complex
relationship between race and law from the perspective of critical race theory . Law
can be read, interpreted, and im-plemented from various angles depending on who
reads or interprets it and, more importantly, who is the subject of a particular law.
Looking from a critical race theory perspective, I learned that court decisions are
not dead materials. Their lifetime is much longer than their historical moment of
decision. They can be interpreted, reused, and abused de-pending on what current
motives prevail. Law also could be used as a political tool to protect the interests of
[*122] the dominant class by empowering them, while subordinating certain groups
to keep them under control. Domination and subordination constitute an economic
and political project. In this process, law is a useful tool of dominant ideol-ogy in any
given society. According to scholar Carol Greenhouse, "courts, as well as law itself
are places where ideolo-gies are formed and articulated." n3 "Culture and ideology
interact with politics and law." n4 Considering the versatile use of the legal system, I
will approach the theme of this Article claiming that the term "Islam" historically has
been used as a common denominator to establish a category, constructing "others"
by reference to a dominant white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant American culture and
ideology. The legal system articulates, permits, and allows this construction
implicitly or explicitly, using as a strong justification its sense of the foreign culture
of Muslims as sometimes "uncivilized." This background prepared the post 9/11
political environment by using the state's responsibility to protect American citizens
from "terrorism." I will argue that, contrary to general understanding, Muslims were
subject to discriminatory behavior before the 2001 terrorist attack. This
discrimination goes back to the historical period of immigration and citizenship
discourse. Over the years, various national and international policies and events
paved the way for post-9/11 discrimi-nation and anti-Muslim behavior on social,
political, and legal fronts. As a result, Islamophobia quickly came to the surface.

A2 Learn Language of State

American political structures inevitably use anti-Islam rhetoriclearning the language of the state is only harmful- it
indoctrinates us in Islamophobic thought
CAIR 13 (Council on American-Islam Relations. Legislating Fear. August 20,
2013. Page 72-73. http://www.cair.com/images/islamophobia/LegislatingFear.pdf)//EMerz
Researchers found that Americans have equal levels of opposition to both Christian
and Muslim immigrants. However, while opposition to Christian immigrants is not
displayed publicly, there is nothing politically correct or socially desirable about
hiding opposition to extending citizenship to legal Muslim immigrants, quite the
opposite, in fact. Citizens are quite comfortable not only opposing it, but also being
public about that fact. 159 A number of mainstream candidates for the Republican
presidential nomination used Islamophobic rhetoric. This issue is covered at length
in the Islamophobia in the 2012 election section of this report. In Tennessee, the
Williamson County Republican Party, the Stewart County Republican Party, the
Carroll County Republican Party and perhaps several others adopted resolutions
criticizing that states governor for hiring an American Muslim lawyer. The
Williamson County Republican Partys resolution said the governor had, elevated
and/or afforded preferential political status to Sharia adherents in Tennessee. 160
The Stewart County Republican Party Resolution said, One of the latest Executive
Service Employees has included Samar Ali, an expert in Shariah Compliant Finance
which is one of the many ways Islamic terrorism is funded. Some examples of antiMuslim rhetoric during the period covered by this report include: John Joseph Jay,
who along with Pamela Geller incorporated the inner core American Freedom
Defense Initiative, advocated taking out leading media figures and incumbent
elected officials along with an exhortation to, burn all the mosques, period.
Speaking outside a fundraising event for a Muslim charity in Yorba Linda, Calif., in
2011, Councilwoman Deborah Pauly (R-Villa Park) told a crowd, "What's going on
over there [at the fundraiser] right now that is pure, unadulterated evil," and
Make no mistake my friends, these who are assembling are enemies of America.
Later she added, "I know quite a few Marines who will be very happy to help these
terrorists to an early meeting in paradise. Young children were among the events
attendees. Televangelist Pat Robertson compared those who oppose Islam in
America to those who opposed Nazis. 162 When the supermarket chain Whole
Foods launched an online only marketing campaign seeking to appeal to Muslim
customers during Ramadan, it came under attack. For example, anti-Muslim blogger
Debbie Schlussel wrote, Whole Foods for the Organically Conscious Jihadist.163
Executives at one of the outlets twelve operating regions reacted to Islamophobic
pressure by circulating an internal memo that was leaked to the press advising
stores to avoid giving the impression that the chain was celebrating or promoting
Ramadan. Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) expressed his exasperation when a guy in
Arabian dress did not receive secondary screening in an airport. 164 Rep. Allen
West (R-Fla.) sponsored a congressional briefing to present a conspiratorial report

titled, "Homegrown Jihad in the USA: Muslim Brotherhood's Deliberate, Premeditated

Plan Now Reaching Maturity."165 The report was put together by Citizen's for
National Security, which has also put together a report on alleged Islamic
infiltrations into Florida textbooks. A Republican state representative from
Tennessee, Rick Womick, told reporters, "Personally, I don't trust one Muslim in our
military." He agreed that all Muslims should be removed from the military. 166
According to Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, the First Amendment
does not apply to Muslims. Islam has no fundamental First Amendment claims, for
the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam, Fisher
wrote in a blog post. He later added, The First Amendment was written by the
Founders to protect the free exercise of Christianity. They were making no effort to
give special protections to Islam. Quite the contrary. Real estate mogul Donald
Trump gained national attention as he considered a run for the Republican
presidential nomination. During that period of media attention, he said, "Well, I'll tell
you what. The Koran is very interesting. A lot of people say it teaches love and there
is a very big group of people who really understand the Koran far better than I do.
I'm certainly not an expert to put it mildly, but there's something there that teaches
some very negative vibe. 168 Cal Thomas, the nations number-one ranked
syndicated columnist, wrote, Islam is a copycat religion, taking from old and new
testaments; denying some of it, while adding to it. And if you read the last chapter
of revelation, you see Gods judgment on people who add to or subtract from his
word. There is only one word of God and Muhammed isnt it. 169 Thomas was
responding to an op-ed that explained how Muslims hold Jesus in high regard.
Thomas had previously compared Muslims to cancer. 170 Colorado State Sen.
Kevin Grantham (R-Caon City) found the idea of banning mosque construction in
America worth considering. 171 The Public Religion Research Institute172 included
the following points in a report published in September 2012: There is a strong
correlation between trusting Fox News and negative views of Islam and Muslims.
This pattern is evident even among conservative political and religious groups.
Among all Republicans, nearly two-thirds (63 percent) say that Islam is at odds with
American values.

A2 Muslims in Office
Although Muslims participate in politics, the government
engages them in a way that homogenizes their identities and
minimizes change
Al-Arian and Kanjwal, 14 ( Abdullah Al-Arian and Hafsa Kanjwal. The Perils
of American Muslim Politics. July 10, 2014.
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18475/the-perils-of-american-muslimpolitics)//EMerz
While many may consider the increasing involvement of Muslims in the corridors of
US empire to be a positive development for American Islam, especially in terms of
the role they may play in changing US policies towards Muslim communities at
home and abroad, the ways in which this is occurring and the long-term implications
for such involvement is being largely ignored. Cosmetic appearances of acceptance
notwithstanding, one can scarcely point to any substantive policy changes
over the past decade in relation to foreign or domestic issues that
historically have been of importance to Muslim communities. While the
discursive techniques the establishment uses have become more inclusive of
particular segments of the American Muslim leadership, in some ways, this
has only served to sow deeper divisions within the community and
alienate dissenting voices. One of the primary consequences of this type of
engagement is the creation of a moderate Muslim and subsequently the
promotion of a moderate Islam. As has become more apparent in recent years, a
moderate Muslim is not simply one who rejects violence and fundamentalism (the
underpinnings of both of these assumptions demand their own critique), but one
who is also uncritical of empire, liberalism, and neoliberal economic policies. Critics
have repeatedly noted how the conceptualization of a moderate Muslim is intended
to fit within a set of binary designations, the good Muslim/bad Muslim divide that
gained traction during the Bush presidency. It is not simply a description of modes
of ritual practice, but rather, of ones residual benefit to the advancement of
government policy. As Mahmood Mamdani asserts, the implication is unmistakable
and undisguised: whether in Afghanistan, Palestine or Pakistan, Islam must be
quarantined and the devil exorcised from it by a Muslim civil war (Mamdani 24). As
Tariq Ramadan notes, the binary has existed since Western colonial incursion into
Muslim landsgood Muslims were those who collaborated with the colonial
enterprise or accepted the values and customs of the dominant power. The rest, the
bad Muslims, those who resisted religiously, culturally or politically, were
systematically denigrated, dismissed as the other and repressed as a danger. In
the US context, a good Muslim overlooks the role that US policies have played in
political and socioeconomic developments in Muslim societies, and instead situates
blame entirely on other Muslims understanding or interpretation of Islam. The role
of the establishment in crafting this moderate Muslim subject by determining the
lines of what is acceptable and unacceptable is evident through the patronage of
particular voices in the Muslim community, as seen by the RAND reports. Consider,
for instance, a 2006 New York Times profile of two prominent American Muslim

leaders, whose history of anti-American rhetoric is laid bare as part of their

rehabilitation and reinvention as mainstream leaders whose religious devotion
became an important asset to the Bush Administrations ideological battles. The
mainstream medias construction of such born-again moderates has been
inextricably linked with the broader aims of US empire.

A2 Racism Good?!
This argument reveals that they dont have a single thought
besides the politics DA we dont make you defend racism
good or islamophobia good, we make you defend USFG
domestic surveillance if domestic surveillance is messed up
thats a reason to vote aff if they couldnt think of a strategy
beyond racism good they gotta step that research game up

A2 Steinberg and Freeley

Steinberg and Freeley is aff evidence it isnt about defending
the process of institutional decision-making, it says we should
examine how institutions reached bad decisions, i.e. why we
invaded Iraq pro-tip, it had a lot do with islamophobia and
imperialism we challenge structural racism and what
decisions the institution makes
Heres one more line that clearly flows aff Our success or
failure in life is largely determined by our ability to make wise
decisions for ourselves and to influence the decisions of
others all of our args prove student dissent is a better way
to produce institutional change than imagining Muslims have
access to political institutions that permanently target them

A2 SSD
We dont have to prove switch side debate is bad, we have to
defend surveillance is bad, and we did it in a pretty clear and
predictable way. Its not our fault that they cant prove
surveillance is good without the politics DA

A2 Structural Change Key

Fiating reform in institutions fails, we must change our society first
otherwise the same violence occurs in different forms
Wiley and Powell, 6 [Maya Wiley, Center for Social inclusion, Open society
institution, J.D. from Columbia law school.& John A. Powell Professor of Law;
Professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies; Robert D. Haas
Chancellor's Chair in Equity and Inclusion; Director, Haas Institute for a Fair and
Inclusive Society Tearing Down Structural Racism and Rebuilding Communities
Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository 1/1 2006]
Our laws and policies have failed to understand both how institutions and structures
work and the interactive nature of white privilege with nonwhite subordination. One
example is the narrow concept of intentional racist acts as actionable.4 8 Our legal
system recognizes to a limited degree that individuals engage in racist processes
unintentionally-unconscious racism. Generally, however, the remedies for conscious
or unconscious racism focus on changing the offending individuals' racial attitudes
and racist behavior. Even when reform has been institutional, the victories may be
short-lived. Progress in one area can easily be undermined by what is happening in
another area. For example, while Brown v. Board of Education was a momentous
legal victory for the civil rights movement, housing segregation, and discrimination
have made integration strategies difficult. 4 9 Blacks, Latinos, and whites did not
and still largely do not live in the same communities. Also, the Brown decision,
coupled with federal policies that created incentives for suburbanization, led to
white flight from urban areas to the suburbs.5 When lawyers, quite rightly, sought
to create cross-jurisdictional integration strategies, the Supreme Court, in protection
of white geographic and psychological space, refused to permit interjurisdictional
desegregation remedies and instead constitutionalized localism. 5 ' Housing
patterns and governmental boundaries, both of which have operated to protect
separate white space, are part of an institutional relationship with schools operating
in race-specific ways. This understanding clarifies the distinction between
institutional and structural racism. Institutional racism, as we are using the phrase,
refers to practices and conditions in a single institution. We must transform
institutional behavior. That behavior, however, cannot be thought of as
located only within the target institution. Just as individual strategies alone
cannot adequately address institutional racism, focusing only on single
institutions cannot adequately address structural racism.

A2 T Version
If we win the topical version doesnt solve islamophobia the
entire Aff is a DA and you weigh it just like any other CP vs
plan debate -- state-centric curtailment will inevitably fail
circumvention, increase in suppression, and extension of
power
Schriefer, 10advocacy director at Freedom House and contributor to New York
Times (Paula, 11/9/10, "The Wrong Way to Combat 'Islamophobia'", New York Times,
www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/opinion/10iht-edschriefer.html?
_r=0&module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=Opinion&action=keypress&region=Fi
xedLeft&pgtype=article)//twemchen
This week, member states of the United Nations will vote on what has become an annual resolution, On Combating
Defamation of Religions, put forward by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a group of 57 states with large
Islamic populations. The resolution condemns what it calls defamation of religions a vague notion that can
perhaps best be described as a form of expression that offends anothers religious sensibilities and urges

The resolutions are part of a larger and dangerous

campaign to create a global blasphemy law to combat what Muslim leaders refer to
as Islamophobia. Such a campaign is deeply flawed from a human rights
perspective, both in its equation of religious discrimination (a legitimate human rights
violation) with the vague concept of defamation, as well as in the proposed remedy of
imposing legal limits on freedom of expression. A recent Freedom House report looking at
countries to enact laws that prohibit such forms of expression.

blasphemy laws in seven countries documents the negative impact of such laws on a range of fundamental human
rights, while noting how such laws actually contribute to greater interfaith strife and conflict. Because no one can

laws that attempt to ban it are themselves vague,

highly prone to arbitrary enforcement and are used to stifle everything from
political opposition to religious inquiry. Particularly when applied in countries with
weak democratic safeguards e.g., strong executives, subservient judiciaries,
corrupt law enforcement blasphemy laws do nothing to achieve their supposed goals of
promoting religious tolerance and harmony and instead are disproportionally
used to suppress the freedom of religious minorities or members of the majority religion that
agree on what constitutes blasphemy,

hold views considered unorthodox. In Pakistan, for example, Christians and Ahmadiyya (Muslims who do not believe
Muhammad was the final prophet) make up only 2 percent of the population, but have been the target of nearly half
of the more than 900 prosecutions for blasphemy in the past two decades. The remaining prosecutions have been
made against Muslims themselves, often simply as an easy way to settle personal scores that have nothing to do
with religion. Mere accusations of blasphemy have led to mob violence in which people have been maimed or killed
and whole communities devastated. The governments of countries that already have such problematic laws on the
books are precisely those countries leading the charge to create an international blasphemy law through the United
Nations. The motivations of states like Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia countries with appalling records on
religious freedom and broader human rights are unquestionably hypocritical and have more to do with their
desire to score points with unhappy domestic populations and religious extremists than the desire to foster religious
tolerance. Support for blasphemy laws is high among the general public in the Islamic world. Even the staunchest
advocates of human rights in the Middle East, individuals who are openly critical of their corrupt and authoritarian
leaders, balk at the idea that the publication of the Danish cartoons or the burning of a Koran should be protected
forms of freedom of expression. In a part of the world where ones religion is as key to ones identity as nationality
and race, most people simply view such forms of expression as a bigoted attack on their very existence. Such views
are bolstered by the need to better address the real issues of discrimination and violence against individuals
because of their religious beliefs, even in established democracies .

It is a fact that political parties

espousing xenophobic and anti-Islamic views in Europe have gained in both
popularity and representation, and that legal policies have been enacted that most
human rights organizations rightly see as restricting the fundamental rights of Muslims to practice

their religious beliefs. It is also a fact that many of the same people who defended the Danish cartoons as an
important form of free expression somehow feel perfectly justified in criticizing the plans to build an Islamic Center

hypocrisy in Europe and the

United States does not justify attempts to bring governmental oversight into
what constitutes offensive expression. Even with the best intentions , which are often
lacking, governments should never be in the business of policing speech . The tools
near the site of the World Trade Center because it offends them. Yet

of defeating intolerance, including religious intolerance, start with a legislative environment that protects peoples
fundamental political rights and civil liberties, including freedom of expression. Blasphemy laws dont work in any
context and U.N. member states should reject them unconditionally.

A combination of the top-down and bottom-up approach is the

most effective way to combating Islamophobia
Tutt, 13Ph.D. in philosophy and Documentary Film Producer, fellow at the
Institute of Social Policy (Daniel, "How Should We Combat Islamophobia?,"
Huffington Post, www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-tutt/how-should-we-combatislamophobia_b_3149768.html)//twemchen
While the dust has yet to settle on the horrific Boston bombings by the Tsarnaev brothers, Muslims have already felt the impact of their association with
Islam. We have witnessed a rise in Islamophobic discourse in the popular media and blogosphere. As an activist who focuses on studying and combatting
Islamophobia, I have wondered how we might effectively re-frame the narrative to prevent more Islamophobia. But at the same time, I have also realized
that in our rush to write op-ed's and respond via the media, we should take a step back to consider the literature on Islamophobia and what it might teach
us at this moment. After reading a diverse set of books and studies by different writers, including anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists and even

two distinctive and quite different approaches to

understanding how Islamophobia can be reduced in society. In one model , what I call the
integrationist model, Islamophobia is understood as a "general fear of the other"
that requires a relationship to repair . The other model, what I call the critical approach,
Islamophobia is understood as a systemic problem , generated by cultural, governmental and civil discourses,
and not as a subjective phenomena in need of a "cure ." Both of these models not only present a different
activists who specifically address Islamophobia, I have identified

view on how to effectively treat or combat Islamophobia, each model also presents different theories of social change. While there are overlapping points
of analysis regarding the causes of Islamophobia in both models, there are significant differences. These differences must not be overlooked because they
inform the way in which programs and grassroots responses to Islamophobia occur. In the wake of the Boston bombing, these models can help us to think
more carefully about whether the way in which we are combatting Islamophobia is contributing to the sorts of changes we want to see in the world, or

The first model, what I call the

"critical" approach is articulated by writers such as Deepa Kumar in "Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire," Stephen Sheehi in
whether they are re-enforcing some of the prejudices we are seeking to ameliorate. The Critical Model

"Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims" and in Saba Mahmoud's work, in "Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic

Islamophobia is not understood as a fear cultural of otherness, but

as a political campaign that is tied to American power and discursive processes that subject
Muslims to the power of the state and other interests. In this model, Islamophobia is understood as a symptom of
American power and imperial interests, particularly the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 9/11, and the bloated
Reformation." In this model,

security state that followed from 9/11. Stephen Sheehi sees the origin of Islamophobia in the rise of neoconservative think tanks following the cold war,
specifically propagated by public intellectuals such as Bernard Lewis and the media commentators, such as Fareed Zakaria, who espouse his views

Islamophobia is not about Islam as an identity, rather it is a construct that cuts across party
lines and is propagated by the global elite to maintain the agenda of global
capitalism. In Sheehi's framework, Islamophobia began on the ashes of Orientalism, and found its sprouting and coming into being inside the
Beltway think tanks. Similarly, we find in Deepa Kumar's text,"Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire," a situating of Islamophobia as a symptom of
American imperial wars and engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. The implication for both Sheehi and Kumar are that large international coalitions should
be formed to advocate for international justice through solidarity with other marginalized groups, and issues such as poverty eradication, Occupy Wall
Street, and so on. Kumar points out that since 9/11, more than 700,000 Muslims have been interviewed by the FBI, which means that nearly 50 percent of
all Muslim households have been touched by the FBI's "investigations" into Muslims. Saba Mahmoud writes in "Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The
Politics of Islamic Reformation" about how the RAND Corporation, a prominent Washington think tank, in their publication, "Civil Democratic Islam," helped
to frame the cultural and media campaign the U.S. government would undergo in response to the war on terror. Then-President Bush's creation of the
"World Muslim Outreach" center was built not exactly on combatting violent extremism, according to Mahmoud, but on identifying and creating a Muslim
subject that can fit into the goals of American interests overseas. The report argues that the government, through a number of different agencies working
in loose concert, must identify the right type of Muslims to partner with. The goal of these efforts must result in a new interpretation of Islam on behalf of
Muslims. The Quran must remain at the level of symbols and of metaphor, of allegory, but not literal truth. This think tank report recognize that moderate
Muslims don't actually see the Quran this way, and many are what the report calls "traditionalists," i.e., they hold a view of the Quran as the true word of
God, and these are the Muslims that are poised as suspect to U.S. interests. It is the reformers and the secularists that are the ones to that the U.S. should

The strategy for combatting Islamophobia

according to this model is highly critical of any attempt to normalize Muslims into
connect with and build alliances with to support U.S. interests.

processes of power. They place critique of the systems that subject Muslims to
surveillance as more significant than seeking to fit into a normative western society.
By placing critique above integration, this model risks forever being the practice of academics and civil rights activists. In Sheehi's framework, any
attempt to defend Islam as a peaceful religion will tend to further entrench the dichotomies of the "good Muslim" vs. the "bad Muslim" that exists as a

this model is difficult for many Muslim American families and civic
leaders that wish to integrate into American society , but it is extraordinary helpful in its diagnosis of the cause
stereotypical construct. In short,

of Islamophobia. The Integrationist Model The second model I have identified in the literature on Islamophobia is what I refer to as the

integrationist" approach. In this view, the primary cause of Islamophobia is a more

general fear of otherness, tied to a lack of inter-personal relations and contact with
"

Muslims in western societies. Key books and studies that support this view include Robert Putnam and David Campbell's "American Grace: How Religions
Divides and Unites Us," Eboo Patel's "Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America" and many think tank publications from groups that

strategies for combatting

Islamophobia are centered on education about Islam and building personal relations with
Muslims. They tend not to encourage civil disobedience, or to situate the cause of
Islamophobia in the context of a larger critique of American power or foreign policy.
Muslims in America are frequently compared to other ethnic minority communities
research Islamophobia, including the Brookings Institute, as well as the State Department. In this model,

that fought for a place at the table such as the Japanese, the Catholics or African Americans. But the question these books pose is the classic debate that
many African American thinkers have posed after the civil rights movement:

are we advocating an assimilation or an

integration into American society? The integrationists promote the idea of building a relation with a Muslim as the cure to
Islamophobia. This theory has some compelling proof in the social science literature where it is referred to as "contact theory." The idea here
is that through personal contact with the other, in this case a Muslim, the prejudice
or potential to be prejudicial also falls by the wayside. Robert Putnam, a Harvard sociologist, argues in
"American Grace" that education about religion is less important for lessening prejudice than is fostering personal relationships. Robert Wright picked up
Putnam's notion when he pointed that the best way to combat Islamophobia is to get more Americans to know a Muslim, which is how America become
less phobic toward the LGBT community. Wright argues that by getting to know the other as a colleague and a family member, the practice of "coming out
of the closet" steadily became more and more acceptable over time precisely because people got to know the other outside of their identity which was

This "bridging model," where the Other is seen as a normal,

everyday person with the same hopes, desires and dreams as anyone else helps to
make them more easily accepted as a human outside of the stereotyped identity.
Wright goes on to point out that the challenge for Muslims in the west is one of numbers: they are low in population and thus it may not be possible to
demonized in popular culture.

promote a wide adoption of acceptance of Muslims until more people actually come into contact with practicing Muslims. The Danger in the Integrationist

It suggests that one must enter into

some neutralized sphere that does not preserve or even celebrate the religious
identity of the other. Once the other has been accepted in this neutral space, will the other, in this case, the Muslim, be permitted to more
authentically express their religious identity in the future? This engagement with the other that is predicated
on a refusal to engage their authentic identity points to a danger in the larger
integrationist view. By stressing commonness not based on preserving and sharing
one's religious identity, but based on first encountering the other outside of their
identity, we deprive the free expression of Muslim identity and we force Muslims to
be subject to the status of an enemy. The political philosopher Carl Schmitt defines the enemy as whoever is "in a specially
Model Where the strategy for acceptance falls short is at the level of acceptance.

intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible." What many authors have pointed out
in the critical model is that Muslim identity is seized and converted into an "in and an out" status in the public sphere. Muslims are either the enemy of the
west, the Other, the non-Christian, the one religion or culture that can't fit into ours (Islamophobic side) or Muslims are the ones that are our friends

The integrationist model thus presents a danger at the level of the

identity of Muslims, forcing them to accept a false construction of what it
means to be Muslim. This is a process that unfolds in the self, the family, the community, the nation-state and the trans-regional
(Islamophilic side).

diaspora. Muslims are forced to take into account the prejudices and expectations of an imagined, non-Muslim observer at all times when this dichotomy

As a result, new distinctions between Self and Other are

constantly woven into Muslim self-definitions. While the integrationist view of combatting Islamophobia usually results in higher levels of
between the good Muslim vs. the bad Muslim.

political influence and societal inclusion, it does come at a price. This price is what one scholar has referred to as "disciplinary inclusion." This idea of
disciplinary inclusion was highlighted in an excellent Stanford law review article entitled "Establishing an Official Islam" by Samuel Rascoff. Rascoff points

Obama administration's unique approach to collaboration with the Muslim community under the banner of
"countering violent extremism" a new euphemism for countering terrorism, is to establish a version of Islam that is
normative to the values of the United States government. By recruiting so called
out how the

"moderate Muslims" as agents of the United States diplomatic efforts abroad in Muslim countries and having government officials attend
Islamic religious events and conferences, Rascoff argues that the government is promoting a threat to the
establishment clause of the US Constitution and the First Amendment that
preserves the right for private citizens to practice and define their religion without
the incursion of any government agency . The ostensible efforts of the U.S. government here seem to be well intentioned.
They want to strengthen moderate Islam and help to portray certain moderate
strands of Islam as the correct and acceptable version of Islam. But what ends up
taking place is a form of Muslim identity that is regulated by the government,
whereby the government goes to co-define what is normative within Islam, and
what is not. While many Muslims in the U.S. and the west more broadly participate in these efforts to strengthen moderate Islam by collaborating
with the government, it is at the same time, a mode of of the philosopher Michel Foucault called governmentality that perpetuates a sense of religious
insiders and outsiders. Muslim Americans, for example, have already shown time and again that they are often the first responders to radicalism and that
their version of Islam is not in need of governmental collaboration in this hands on manner. The truth is that Muslims living in the west, and around the
world for that matter, have the most to lose when it comes to combatting radicalism in the name of their religion. This is why the Muslim community in
Toronto turned in the suspects in the recent planned terrorist attack. While public condemnations of terrorism in the name of Islam coming from Muslims

we have to understand that combatting Islamophobia is a much

larger systemic challenge that requires a combination of both the
integrationist personal engagement as well as the critical approach .
are a good thing to hear,

XTCant Get Elected

Muslim Americans cannot get elected- public prejudice
excludes them from the political positions
Braman and Sinno 9 (Eileen Braman and Abdulkader H. Sinno. An
Experimental Investigation of Causal Attributions for the Political Behavior of Muslim
Candidates: Can a Muslim Represent you? 2009.
http://www.sinno.com/Papers/Braman%20%26%20Sinno.%202009.%20Politics
%20%26%20 Religion.%20Can%20a%20Muslim%20Represent%20you.pdf. Page
248)//EMerz
The under-representation of American Muslims in American politics is even more
puzzling because the immigrant portion of American Muslims enjoys some of the
advantages in education and income that likely facilitate the over-representation of
Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Jews in Congress. Two Zogby polls (2001 and
2004) found that American Muslims have a higher median household income than
Americans as a whole (above $50,000 per year) and that 5859% have completed
their college education, more than twice the national rate.2 All else being equal, we
should see a higher rate of American Muslims running in elections and getting
elected than in society at large, but this is obviously not the case. Qualified Muslims
may be reluctant to run for office if they fear voters will scrutinize their behavior
more closely or judge their actions differently from the way they judge other
candidates for office. Indeed, there is a good deal of survey data that suggests this
could be the case. 249 Polls conducted between 1999 and 2007 by Gallup, Fox
News, the Los Angeles Times, Rasmussen, and Pew find that between 31% and 61%
of their respondents claim that they would not vote for a Muslim candidate
for president.3 Those rates are generally two to five times the rates for Catholics
or Jews, slightly worse than the proportion of those who would not vote for a
Mormon, but a little better than the proportion of those who would not vote for an
atheist. This reluctance to vote for a Muslim presidential candidate extends to
other types of races. A 2003 Pew Survey reports that 31% of the general public
have reasons not to vote for a well qualified candidate who is Muslim when the
office is not specified.4 Thus, observed and latent anti-Muslim sentiment in the
electorate makes it more difficult for Muslims to win the electoral support they need
to win office and also dissuades qualified candidates from running if they fear they
will be harshly judged or discriminated against because of their religion. Indeed,
accounts of local and national Muslim candidates being mistreated because of their
religion are by no means rare.5 Such stories are likely to discourage qualified
candidates from running for office.

XTC/I
Only through cultivating citizen awareness and conceptualizing
the U.S as Empire can we begin to develop a deeper
understanding of the topic
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 74//ejh)
I believe the profligate waste of our resources on irrelevant weapons systems and
the Asian economic meltdown, as well as the continuous trail of military accidents
and of terrorist attacks on American installations and embassies, are all portents of
a twenty-first-century crisis in Americas informal empire, an empire based on the
projection of military power to every corner of the world and on the use of American
capital and markets to force global economic integration on our terms , at whatever
costs to others. To predict the future is an undertaking no thoughtful person would
rush to embrace. What form our imperial crisis is likely to take years or even
decades from now is, of course, impossible to know. But history indicates that,
sooner or later, empires do reach such moments, and it seems reasonable to
assume that we will not miraculously escape that fate .
What we have freed ourselves of, however, is any genuine consciousness of how we
might look to others on this globe. Most Americans are probably unaware of how
Washington exercises its global hegemony, since so much of this activity takes
place either in relative secrecy or under comforting rubrics . Many may, as a start,
find it hard to believe that our place in the world even adds up to an empire. But
only when we come to see our country as both profiting from and trapped within the
structures of an empire of its own making will it be possible for us to explain many
elements of the world that otherwise perplex us. Without good explanations, we
cannot possibly produce policies that will bring us sustained peace and prosperity in
a postCold War world. What has gone wrong in Japan after half a century of
government-guided growth under U.S. protection? Why should the emergence of a
strong China be to anyones disadvantage? Why do American policies toward
human rights, weapons proliferation, terrorism, drug cartels, and the environment
strike so many foreigners as the essence of hypocrisy? Should American-owned and
managed multinational firms be instruments, beneficiaries, or adversaries of United
States foreign policy? Is the free flow of capital really as valuable as free trade in
commodities and manufactured goods? These kinds of questions can only be
answered once we begin to grasp what the United States really is.

XTSequencing
The U.S. is still entrenched in violent intervention action is
key but discussion is a prerequisite to state action were
military reactions are the modus operandi
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 269//ejh)
Since the Gulf War the United States has maintained around thirty-five thousand
troops in Saudi Arabia. Devoutly Muslim citizens of that kingdom see their presence
as a humiliation to the country and an affront to their religion. Dissident Saudis have
launched attacks against Americans and against the Saudi regime itself. After the
June 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartments near Dhahran killed nineteen
American airmen, the international relations commentator William Pfaff offered the
reasonable prediction, Within 15 years at most, if present American and Saudi
Arabian policies are pursued, the Saudi monarchy will be overturned and a radical
and anti-American government will take power in Riyadh.36 Yet American foreign
policy remains on autopilot, instead of withdrawing from a place where a U.S.
presence is only making a dangerous situation worse.
Ten years after the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon monopolizes the formulation
and conduct of American foreign policy. Increasingly, the United States has only
one, commonly inappropriate means of achieving its external objectivesmilitary
force. It no longer has a full repertoire of skills, including a seasoned, culturally and
linguistically expert diplomatic corps; truly viable international institutions that the
American public supports both politically and financially and that can give
legitimacy to American efforts abroad; economic policies that effectively leverage
the tremendous power of the American market into desired foreign responses; or
even an ability to express American values without being charged, accurately, with
hopeless hypocrisy. The use of cruise missiles and B-2 bombers to achieve
humanitarian objectives is a sign of how unbalanced our foreign policy apparatus
has become. The American-inspired and -led NATO intervention in Yugoslavia in the
spring of 1999 to protect the Albanian majority in Kosovo was a tragic example of
what is wrong.

2ac vs Terror DA

2ac**
Reject their scholarship the U.S. projections of success in the
war on terror are based on mischaracterizations and cause
even further blowback
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 80//ejh)
Blowback itself can lead to more blowback, in a spiral of destructive behavior. A
good illustration of this lies in the governments reaction to the August 7, 1998,
bombings of American embassy buildings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, with the
loss of 12 American and 212 Kenyan and Tanzanian lives and some 4,500 injured.
The U.S. government promptly placed the blame on Osama bin Laden, a Saudi who
had long denounced his countrys rulers and their American allies. On August 20,
the United States retaliated by firing nearly eighty cruise missiles (at a cost of
$750,000 each) into a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, and an old
mujahideen camp site in Afghanistan. (One missile went four hundred miles off
course and landed in Pakistan.) Both missile targets had been identified by
American intelligence as enterprises or training areas associated with bin Laden or
his followers. It was soon revealed, however, that the intelligence on both places
had been faulty and that neither target could be connected with those who were
suspected of attacking the embassies. On September 2, 1998 , the U.S. secretary of
defense said that he had been unaware that the plant in Khartoum made medicines,
not nerve gas, when he recommended that it be attacked. He also admitted that the
plants connection to bin Laden was, at best, indirect. 7 Nonetheless, President
Clinton continued to insist that he had repelled an imminent threat to our national
security, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called Sudan a vipers nest of
terrorists.

The causes of blowback are often hidden the U.S. has

committed innumerable atrocities of which the public does not
know that incite violence against them
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 17//ejh)
Actions that generate blowback are normally kept totally secret from the American
public and from most of their representatives in Congress. This means that when
innocent civilians become victims of a retaliatory strike, they are at first unable to
put it in context or to understand the sequence of events that led up to it. In its
most rigorous definition, blowback does not mean mere reactions to historical
events but rather to clandestine operations carried out by the U.S. government that
are aimed at overthrowing foreign regimes, or seeking the execution of people the
United States wants eliminated by friendly foreign armies, or helping launch state
terrorist operations against overseas target populations. The American people may
not know what is done in their name, but those on the receiving end surely do

including the people of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959 to the present),
Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Vietnam (1961-73), Laos (1961-73),
Cambodia (1961-73), Greece (1967-74), Chile (1973), Afghanistan (1979 to the
present), El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua (1980s), and Iraq (1991 to the
present), to name only the most obvious cases.
In a broader sense, blowback is another way of saying that a nation reaps what it
sows. Although individuals usually know what they have sown, they rarely have the
same knowledge on a national level, especially since so much of what the managers
of the American empire have sown has been kept secret. As a concept, blowback is
obviously most easily grasped in its straightforward manifestations. The unintended
consequences of American policies and acts in country X lead to a bomb at an
American embassy in country Y or a dead American in country Z. Certainly, any
number of Americans have been killed in that fashion, from Catholic nuns in El
Salvador to tourists in Uganda who just happened to wander into hidden imperial
scenarios about which they knew nothing.

The war on terror has worsened U.S. security it was an

effort of the military industrial complex, has cultivated
resentment of the US and resulted in more terrorism
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 30//ejh)
The two wars that the United States launched preemptively were the pet projects of
special interest groups that used the attacks of 9/11 as a cover to hijack American
foreign policy and implement their private agendas. These interest groups include
the military-industrial complex and the professional armed forces, close American
supporters of and advisers to the Likud Party in Israel, and neoconservative
enthusiasts for the creation of an American empire. This latter group, concentrated
in right-wing foundations and think tanks in Washington D.C., is composed of
chicken-hawk war lovers (that is, soi-disant military strategists with no experience
of either the armed forces or war) who seized on the national sense of bewilderment
after 9/11 to push the Bush administration into conflicts that were neither relevant
to nor successful in destroying al-Qaeda. Instead, the wars accelerated the
recruitment of more suicidal terrorists and promoted nuclear proliferation in
countries hoping to deter similar preemptive attacks by the United States . Two
years after 9/11, America is unquestionably in greater danger of serious terrorist
threats than it has ever been before.

RCHeg/Empire = Terror
The imperial empire produces a constant state of insecurity
and violenceterrorism is only a result of Americas drive for
power
Chernus, 6Professor of Religious Studies and Co-director of the Peace and
Conflict Studies Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder Ira Chernus
(Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin, Published by
Paradigm Publisher, ISBN 1594512752, p. 53-54)//twemchen
The end of the cold war spawned a tempting fantasy of imperial omnipotence
on a global scale. The neocons want to turn that fantasy into reality. But reality will
not conform to the fantasy; it wont stand still or keep any semblance of permanent order. So the neocons efforts inevitably
backfire. Political scientist Benjamin Barber explains that a nation with unprecedented power has
unprecedented vulnerability: for it must repeatedly extend the compass of its
power to preserve what it already has, and so is almost by definition always overextended. Gary Dorrien
sees insecurity coming at the neoconservatives in another way, too: For the empire, every conflict is a local
concern that threatens its control. However secure it maybe, it never feels secure
enough. The [neocon] unipolarists had an advanced case of this anxiety. . . . Just below the surface of the customary claim to
toughness lurked persistent anxiety. This anxiety was inherent in the problem of empire and, in the
case of the neocons, heightened by ideological ardor.39 If the U.S. must control every event everywhere, as neocons assume,
every act of resistance looks like a threat to the very existence of the nation. There is no good way to distinguish between nations or
forces that genuinely oppose U.S. interests and those that dont. Indeed,

change of any kind, in any nation,

becomes a potential threat. Everyone begins to look like a threatening monster that might have to be destroyed. Its no
surprise that a nation imagined as an implacable enemy often turns into a real enemy. When the U.S. intervenes to
prevent change, it is likely to provoke resistance. Faced with an aggressive U.S.
stance, any nation might get tough in return . Of course, the U.S. can say that it is selflessly trying to serve
the world. But why would other nations believe that? It is more likely that others will resist, making hegemony harder
to achieve. To the neocons, though, resistance only proves that the enemy really is
a threat that must be destroyed. So the likelihood of conflict grows, making everyone less secure. Moreover, the
neocons want to do it all in the public spotlight. In the past, any nation that set out to conquer others usually kept its plans largely
secret. Indeed, the cold war neocons regularly blasted the Soviets for harboring a secret plan for world conquest. Now here they
are calling on the U.S. to blare out its own domineering intentions for all the world to [end page 53] hear. That hardly seems well
calculated to achieve the goal of hegemony. But it is calculated to foster the assertive, even swaggering, mood on the home front
that the neocons long for. Journalist Ron Suskind has noted that neocons always offer a statement of enveloping peril and no

They have no hope of finding a real solution because they

have no reason to look for one. Their story allows for success only as a fantasy. In
hypothesis for any real solution.

reality, they expect to find nothing but an endless battle against an enemy that can never be defeated. At least two prominent
neocons have said it quite bluntly. Kenneth Adelman: We should not try to convince people that things are getting better. Michael
Ledeen: The struggle against evil is going to go on forever.40 This vision of endless conflict is not a conclusion drawn from
observing reality. It is both the premise and the goal of the neocons fantasy. Ultimately, it seems, endless resistance is what they
really want. Their call for a unipolar world ensures a permanent state of conflict, so that
the U.S. can go on forever proving its military supremacy and promoting the manly virtues of militarism. They have to admit that

they must
sound the alarm about a shadowy new kind of enemy, one that can attack in novel,
unexpected ways. They must make distant changes appear as huge imminent threats to America, make the implausible
the U.S., with its vastly incomparable power, already has unprecedented security against any foreign army. So

seem plausible, and thus find new monsters to destroy. The neocons story does not allow for a final triumph of order because it is
not really about creating a politically calm, orderly world. It is about creating a society full of virtuous people who are willing and

Having superior power is less important than

proving superior power. That always requires an enemy. Just as neocons need
monsters abroad, they need a frightened society at home. Only insecurity can
justify their shrill call for a stronger nation (and a higher military budget). The more dire their warnings of
able to fight off the threatening forces of social chaos.

insecurity, the more they can demand greater military strength and moral resolve. Every foreign enemy is, above all, another
occasion to prod the American people to overcome their anxiety, identify evil, fight resolutely against it, and stand strong in defense
of their highest values. Hegemony will do no good unless there is challenge to be met, weakness to be conquered, evil to be
overcome. The American people must actively seek hegemony and make sacrifices for it, to show that they are striving to overcome
their own weakness. So the quest for strength still demands a public confession of weakness, just as the neocons had demanded
two decades earlier when they warned of a Soviet nuclear attack through a window of vulnerability. The quest for strength through
the structures of national security still demands a public declaration of national insecurity. Otherwise, there is nothing to overcome.

The more frightened the public, the more likely it is to believe and enact the neocon
story.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The War on Terror is founded on a fantasythe government
creates terror plots against itself
Rashi, 14freelance journalist and writer for the Huffington Post (Tanjil, 3/16/14,
"The Muslims are Coming!, by Arun Kundnani", Financial Times,
www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/af5ef4c6-aa15-11e3-8bd6-00144feab7de.html)//twemchen
**edited for language
In The Muslims are Coming!, a critique of counterterrorism policy by Arun Kundnani, the wests domestic war on
terror at times resembles a Greene novel populated by a cast of counterterrorism warriors even unlikelier than a

Shahed Hussain, an American petrol pump attendant with a

whom the Federal Bureau of Investigation roped into ensnaring
Muslims into terror plots against US targets planned and financed by the US
government itself. As Judge Colleen McMahon stated in 2011 when sentencing one of Mr
Hussains catches: Only the government could have made a terrorist out of [James]
Cromitie, a man whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope . It is a pity the
judgment is not quoted in full, for it succinctly exemplifies Kundnanis argument. [The
government] created acts of terrorism out of his [its] fantasies of bravado and
bigotry, she said, and then made those fantasies come true. Kundnani, a fellow of the
Soros Foundation, believes the wider war on terror at home to be founded on a fantasy.
The west, he says, is dedicating tens of billions of dollars a year to fighting a
domestic threat of terror violence that is largely imagined. Based on years of research from
hawker of Hoovers in Havana. Take, for example,
trade in fake drivers licences,

Dallas to Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, this book is the most rigorous account yet of this familiar argument, which
British film-maker Adam Curtis called the power of nightmares. Kundnani shares Curtiss view, too, that

Muslims have replaced communists as the phantasm of policy makers and

conspiracy theorists, a conceptual scaffolding inherited from the cold war . But to
imply vast chunks of government policy are built on fables itself rings of conspiracy theory.

Ethical Distancing
The U.S. war on terror is an effort to distance the U.S. from
what it created Taliban control was an intentional product of
U.S. intervention
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 87//ejh)
Americans generally think of Pol Pot as some kind of unique, self-generated monster
and his killing fields as an inexplicable atavism totally divorced from civilization.
But without the United States governments Vietnam-era savagery, he could never
have come to power in a culture like Cambodias , just as Maos uneducated peasant
radicals would never have gained legitimacy in a normal Chinese context without
the disruption and depravity of the Japanese war. Significantly, in its calls for an
international tribunal to try the remaining leaders of the Khmer Rouge for war
crimes, the United States has demanded that such a court restrict its efforts to the
period from 1975 to 1979that is, after the years of carpet bombing were over and
before the U.S. government began to collaborate with the Khmer Rouge against the
Vietnamese Communists, who invaded Cambodia in 1978, drove the Khmer Rouge
from power, and were trying to bring some stability to the country.
Even an empire cannot control the long-term effects of its policies. That is the
essence of blowback. Take the civil war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in which Soviet
forces directly intervened on the government side and the CIA armed and supported
any and all groups willing to face the Soviet armies. Over the years the fighting
turned Kabul, once a major center of Islamic culture, into a facsimile of Hiroshima
after the bomb. American policies helped ensure that the Soviet Union would suffer
the same kind of debilitating defeat in Afghanistan as the United States had in
Vietnam. In fact, the defeat so destabilized the Soviet regime that at the end of the
1980s it collapsed. But in Afghanistan the United States also helped bring to power
the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic movement whose policies toward women,
education, justice, and economic well-being resemble not so much those of
Ayatollah Khomeinis Iran as those of Pol Pots Cambodia. A group of these
mujahideen, who only a few years earlier the United States had armed with groundto-air Stinger missiles, grew bitter over American acts and policies in the Gulf War
and vis--vis Israel. In 1993, they bombed the World Trade Center in New York and
assassinated several CIA employees as they waited at a traffic light in Langley,
Virginia. Four years later, on November 12, 1997, after the Virginia killer had been
convicted by an American court, unknown assailants shot and killed four American
accountants, unrelated in any way to the CIA, in their car in Karachi, Pakistan, in
retaliation.

Security K
Islamophobia stems from securitization in the war on terror
Huq 13 (Aziz Huq. The Social Production of National Security. 2013.
http://chicagounbound. uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1425&context=public_law_and_legal_theory. Page 638-639.)//EMerz
National security bears all the hallmarks of a quintessential public good.1 Once
provided, individuals cannot be excluded from its benefits. One persons enjoyment
also leaves the balance undiminished for others. Susceptible to individuals free
riding, private action is likely to undersupply public goods such as national security.
Hence, government production would seem the best method to achieve its supply.
Indeed, the federal government has been the principal supplier of national security
since the Republics founding. The framers of the Constitution, moreover,
understood security to be a central charge of the newly empowered national
government. But challenges to public security morph over time. In the past decade,
it has been in large measure the threat to civilian life from al Qaeda, its affiliates,
and fellow travelers that has animated security policy. Concerns about non-statesponsored terrorism have spurred institutional transformations in government,2 new
surveillance technologies,3 novel uses of familiar policy tools,4 and controversial
foreign military deployments.5 Mesmerized by these transformations, legal scholars
have been drawn ineluctably to the task of examining the states responses to
terrorism, including a seemingly inexorable engorgement of the national security
state.6 Never, it seems, has the idea that the state must monopolize responses to
political violence seemed so compelling. Yet even as new laws and practices erode
the legal and institutional constraints of bygone times and the state undertakes
previously unimaginable forms of surveillance with devices that were science fiction
a mere generation ago, a scintilla of doubt about the governments proper role has
emerged. Paradoxically, it was the state itself that first planted that seed.
Governments on both sides of the Atlantic have started in recent years to suggest
tentatively, incompletely, and in piecemeal fashionthat the provision of national
security should not be the monopoly of the state or its subcontractors. Mutations in
the threat from al Qaeda have stimulated rethinking of the production function for
national security. As a result, both U.S. and U.K. official policy documents from 2010
onward have identified a necessary role for informal nonstate actorsranging from
individuals to private associations to familiesin creating security against terrorism.
These policy statements boldly claim that nonstate actors are likely to have a
dispositive influence on both the scale of terrorism-related security threats and the
effectiveness of state responses. Stated otherwise, they point toward the possibility
of a social production of security against terrorism.

1ar XT vs Terror DA

XTRCBlowback
9/11 was a response to American foreign policy with no other
way to demonstrate weakness in U.S. political legitimacy, the
assassins of 9/11 attacked civilians the way the U.S. did with
bombs in other countries
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 216//ejh)
The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not attack America, as political
leaders and news media in the United States have tried to maintain; they attacked
American foreign policy. Employing the strategy of the weak, they killed innocent
bystanders, whose innocence is, of course, no different from that of the civilians
killed by American bombs in Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. It was
probably the most striking instance in the history of international relations of the
use of political terrorism to influence events.
Political terrorism is usually defined by its strategic objectives. Its first goal is
normally to turn those domestic or international conditions terrorists perceive to be
unjust into unstable revolutionary situations. To a wavering population, terrorist acts
are intended to demonstrate that the monopoly of force exercised by incumbent
authorities can be broken. The essential idea is to disorient that population by
demonstrating through apparently indiscriminate violence that the existing regime
cannot protect the people nominally under its authority. The effect on the individual
is supposedly not only anxiety, but withdrawal from the relationships making up the
established order of society.7
Of course, such a strategy rarely works as intended: it usually has the opposite
effect of encouraging people to support any strong reassertion of authority. That
was indeed what happened within the United States following the attacks of
September 11, but not necessarily throughout the Islamic world, where the
terrorists objective of displaying Americas vulnerabilities and destabilizing the
world of the advanced capitalist nations was all too effective.
A second strategic objective of revolutionary terrorism is to provoke ruling elites into
a disastrous overreaction, thereby creating widespread resentment against them.
This is a classic strategy, and when it works, the impact can be devastating. As
explained by Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian guerrilla leader whose writings
influenced political terrorists in the 1960s and 1970s, if a government can be
provoked into a purely military response to terrorism, its overreaction will alienate
the masses, causing them to revolt against the army and the police and blame
them for this state of things.8 The second Palestinian Intifada of 2000-03 illustrates
the dynamic: terrorist attacks elicited powerful and disproportionate Israeli military
reactions that led to an escalating cycle of more attacks and more retaliation,
completely militarizing relations between the two peoples.

One mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter the only

way for terrorists to retaliate to the offensive and invulnerable
American military is to target U.S. civilians
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 77//ejh)
It is now widely recognized, for example, that the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight
103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which resulted in the deaths of 259 passengers and
11 people on the ground, was retaliation for a 1986 Reagan administration aerial
raid on Libya that killed President Muammar Khadaffis stepdaughter. Some in the
United States have suspected that other events can also be explained as blowback
from imperial acts. For example, the epidemic of cocaine and heroin use that has
afflicted American cities during the past two decades was probably fueled in part by
Central and South American military officers or corrupt politicians whom the CIA or
the Pentagon once trained or supported and then installed in key government
positions. For example, in Nicaragua in the 1980s, the U.S. government organized a
massive campaign against the socialist-oriented Sandinista government. American
agents then looked the other way when the Contras, the military insurgents they
had trained, made deals to sell cocaine in American cities in order to buy arms and
supplies.4
If drug blowback is hard to trace to its source, bomb attacks, whether on U.S.
embassies in Africa, the World Trade Center in New York City, or an apartment
complex in Saudi Arabia that housed U.S. servicemen, are another matter. One
mans terrorist is, of course, another mans freedom fighter, and what U.S. officials
denounce as unprovoked terrorist attacks on its innocent citizens are often meant
as retaliation for previous American imperial actions. Terrorists attack innocent and
undefended American targets precisely because American soldiers and sailors firing
cruise missiles from ships at sea or sitting in B-52 bombers at extremely high
altitudes or supporting brutal and repressive regimes from Washington seem
invulnerable. As members of the Defense Science Board wrote in a 1997 report to
the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology, Historical data show
a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and an
increase in terrorist attacks against the United States . In addition, the military
asymmetry that denies nation states the ability to engage in overt attacks against
the United States drives the use of transnational actors [that is, terrorists from one
country attacking in another].5

An anti-U.S. middle east was predicted and cultivated by the

U.S. the extension of empire has and will continue to
encourage retaliation
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 22, 23//ejh)

The CIA supported Osama bin Laden, like so many other extreme fundamentalists
among the mujahideen in Afghanistan, from at least 1984 on. In 1986 it built for him
the training complex and weapons storage tunnels around the Afghan city of Khost
where he trained many of the 35,000 Arab Afghans. Bin Ladens men constituted
a sort of Islamic Abraham Lincoln Brigade of young volunteers from around the
Muslim world who wanted to fight on the side of the Afghans against the Soviet
Union. In August 1998, on President Bill Clintons orders, the Khost complex was hit
with cruise missiles, in retaliation for bin Ladens attacks that month on the
American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. For once the CIA knew exactly where
the targets were, since it had built them.
Osama bin Laden, the well-connected, rich young Saudi (he was born around 1957),
was well positioned to become a close ally with other friends of the CIA: Prince Turki
Bin Faisal, the head of Istakhbarat, the Saudi Intelligence Service, and Lieutenant
General Hameed Gul, head of Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency,
which America used to funnel money and weapons to the mujahideen in order to
maintain a facade of deniability with the Soviet Union. Since 1982, the ISI also took
the lead in recruiting radical Muslims to come to Pakistan, receive training, and fight
on the Afghan side.
It was only after the Russians had bombed Afghanistan back to the stone age and
suffered a Vietnam-like defeat, and the United States had walked away from the
death and destruction the CIA had helped cause, that Osama bin Laden turned
against his American supporters. The last straw as far as he was concerned was the
way that infidel American troopsaround 35,000 of themremained in Saudi
Arabia after the first Gulf War to prop up that decadent, fiercely authoritarian
regime. Devoutly Muslim citizens of that kingdom saw the troops presence as a
humiliation to the country and an affront to their religion. Dissident Saudis began to
launch attacks against Americans and against the Saudi regime itself. In June 1996,
terrorists associated with Osama bin Laden bombed the Khobar Towers apartments
near Dhahran airport, killing nineteen American airmen and wounding scores more.
That same year, the international relations commentator William Pfaff offered the
reasonable prediction, Within 15 years at most, if present American and Saudi
Arabian policies are pursued, the Saudi monarchy will be overturned and a radical
and anti-American government will take power in Riyadh.6 Such a course of events
has occurred elsewhere many times beforein Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Greece, the
Philippines, and South Korea, where indigenous peoples fought hard to free
themselves from American-backed dictatorships. Yet American foreign policy
remained on autopilot, instead of withdrawing from a place where a U.S. presence
was only making a dangerous situation worse. Only after the defeat of Iraq in the
spring of 2003 did the United States announce that it would withdraw most of its
forces from Saudi Arabia. By then, however, the gesture was meaningless. The
United States has massive military forces concentrated in nearby Qatar, Kuwait,
Bahrain, the United Arab Republics, and Oman, not to mention its newly acquired
bases in such Muslim countries as Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan,
Pakistan, Djibouti, and in territories with large Muslim populations such as Kosovo,
Serbia. All of this suggests future blowback against the United States.

EpistOurs Rules
The U.S. government knows that acts of terrorism often occur
in response to U.S. action terror responses have regularly
occurred after U.S. intervention long before 9/11
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 18//ejh)
The term blowback first appeared in a classified government document in the
CIAs post-action report on the secret overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953.
In 2000, James Risen of the New York Times explained: When the Central
Intelligence Agency helped overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh as Irans prime
minister in 1953, ensuring another 25 years of rule for Shah Mohammed Reza
Pahlavi, the CIA was already figuring that its first effort to topple a foreign
government would not be its last. The CIA, then just six years old and deeply
committed to winning the cold war, viewed its covert action in Iran as a blueprint for
coup plots elsewhere around the world, and so commissioned a secret history to
detail for future generations of CIA operatives how it had been done. . . . Amid the
sometimes curious argot of the spy worldsafebases and assets and the like
the CIA warns of the possibilities of blowback. The word . . . has since come into
use as shorthand for the unintended consequences of covert operations.3

9/11 was forewarned collateral damage of U.S. foreign policy

Bush administration leadership knowingly initiated,
weaponized and abandoned Afghani militant organizations
while aware of the potential consequences
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 21,22//ejh)
The attacks of September 11 descend in a direct line from events in 1979, the year
in which the CIA, with full presidential authority, began carrying out its largest ever
clandestine operationthe secret arming of Afghan freedom fighters (mujahideen)
to wage a proxy war against the Soviet Union, which involved the recruitment and
training of militants from all over the Islamic world. Various members of the current
Bush cabinet were complicit in generating the blowback of 9/11. Former general
Colin Powell certainly knows why they might hate us. He was Ronald Reagans last
national security adviser and then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the
George H. W. Bush administration. Others include former secretary of defense Dick
Cheney, former National Security Council staff official Condoleezza Rice, former
Reagan confidant and emissary to Saddam Hussein Donald Rumsfeld, former
Pentagon official in both the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations Paul
Wolfowitz, and many more. Throughout the 1980s, these officials designed and
implemented the secret war in Afghanistan and then, after the Soviet Unions
withdrawal, made the decision to abandon Americas Islamic agents.

The USSRs invasion of Afghanistan was deliberately provoked. In his 1996 memoirs,
former CIA director Robert Gates writes that the American intelligence services
actually began to aid the mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan not after the Soviet
invasion of that country, but six months before it.4 And in a 1998 interview with the
French weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, former president Carters National
Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, unambiguously confirmed Gatess assertion.5
According to the official version of history, Brzezinski told the Nouvel Observateur,
CIA aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army
invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until
now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter
signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in
Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him
that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
When asked whether he regretted these actions, Brzezinski replied:
Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of
drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day
that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially:
We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.
Nouvel Observateur: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic
fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of
the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and
the end of the cold war?
Brzezinski, Carter, and their successors in the Reagan administration, including
George H. W. Bush, Gates, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Armitage, and Powel l
none of whom has come forward to draw attention to this history all bear some
responsibility for the 1.8 million Afghan casualties, 2.6 million refugees, and 10
million unexploded land mines that followed from their decisions, as well as the
collateral damage that befell New York City in September 2001 from an
organization they helped create during the years of anti-Soviet Afghan resistance.

EpistYours Doesnt
Understanding of terrorism is limited- all research is rooted in
state dominated western epistemology
Jackson 7 (Richard Jackson is Reader in the Department of International Politics,
Aberystwyth University, and a Senior Researcher at the Centre for the Study of
Radicalisation and Contemporary Political Violence (CSRV). He is the founding editor
of the journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 2007, Terrorism Studies and the Politics
of State Power, Paper prepared for International Studies Associations 47th annual
convention, http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/handle/2160/1951/ISA-2007Paper-CTS-Jackson2.pdf?sequence=1)
An analysis of the terrorism studies field reveals a number of methodological, theoretical and ethical-normative
problems. One of its more serious problems is its tendency to uncritically reproduce a number of highly
questionable narratives and assumptions about terrorism as a phenomenon and counterterrorism as state

terrorism research unreflectively

assumes that: non-state terrorism poses an existential threat to modern societies;
there is a new terrorism that is religiously motivated, willing to employ weapons of
mass destruction, and aimed primarily at causing mass casualties; the roots of
terrorism lie in individual psychological abnormality and religious extremism; and
coercive-based counterterrorism is an effective response to non-state terrorism . This
paper argues that these misconceptions are not simply errors based on poor research. Rather, these broadly
accepted understandings this terrorism knowledge also work politically to reify and
reproduce state power. In particular, this scientifically generated terrorism knowledge frequently
functions to, among others: de-legitimise resistance by non-state actors; justify domestic political
projects unconnected to terrorism, such as social surveillance; bolster the
power and priorities of the agencies of state security; benefit powerful economic actors linked
response. For example, a great deal of past and recently published

to the security sector, such as private security firms, defence industries, and pharmaceutical companies; control
wider social and political dissent and set the parameters for acceptable political debate; and provide intellectual
justification for foreign imperial projects. However, academic research is never without political and normative
consequence; knowledge is always for somebody and for something. This paper argues that given the current
situation in the field, there is an urgent need for an explicitly critical terrorism studies. 1
This paper is a work in progress for a symposium on Making the Case for a Critical Terrorism Studies for the
journal European Political Science. All comments and suggestions are welcome. It is supported by an overseas
conference grant from the British Academy, for which the author is extremely grateful. 2 In the years since the
attacks of September 11, 2001, terrorism studies has undergone a major transformation from minor subfield of
security studies to a large stand alone field with its own dedicated journals, research centres, leading scholars and
experts, research funding opportunities, conferences and university study programmes. In fact, it is probably one of
the fastest expanding areas of research in the Western academic world, with literally thousands of new books and
articles published over the past few years,2 and increasing numbers of postgraduate dissertations.3 While such a
rapid expansion offers the possibility of exciting new research and the potential for genuine advancement in
existing knowledge, past and recent review exercises on the state of the field would inject a note of caution into
such optimism. These reviews suggest that terrorism studies as a whole is beset by a number of epistemological,
theoretical, methodological and ethical-normative problems which limit its potential for producing rigorous empirical
findings and genuine theoretical advancement. In this paper, I briefly touch on some of the key criticisms that have

what is arguably one of the most

serious problems facing the field, namely, its state-centricity and the way it functions
politically to reify state power. Its close identification with state priorities and perspectives, its uncritical
been levelled at the field of terrorism studies. In particular, I focus on

reproduction of accepted narratives and terrorism knowledge, its conformity and totalising certainty and its inbuilt
commitment to providing counter-terrorist policy relevant research, poses major analytical and normative problems
for the field. Analytically, it narrows the potential range of research subjects, encourages conformity in outlook and
method, and obstructs vigorous, wide-ranging debate, particularly regarding the causes of non-state terrorism.
Normatively, it identifies an entire field and scholarly community with the reproduction of state power and the
promotion of particular kinds of political projects and forms of state action of dubious efficacy or moral legitimacy. In
short, it functions to construct the field of terrorism studies as an arm of state security. For these reasons, I argue

that there is an urgent need for an explicitly critical terrorism studies. A critical terrorism studies (CTS) would be
distinctive due to its willingness to challenge accepted knowledge and commonsense about terrorism and its acute
awareness of the power-knowledge relationship in terrorism-related research. As a consequence, CTS scholarship
would be characterized by a critical reflexivity regarding the academic production and uses of terrorism-related
research, the adoption of a broader research focus that includes the use of terrorism by state actors, an
acknowledgement of 2 Research using publishing databases has found that even before 2001, terrorism
publications had grown over 234 percent on average between 1988-2001 in fields like terrorism studies,
communication studies, comparative politics, peace studies, economics and psychology. Research by Avishag
Gordon found that in the ten years from 1990-1999 at least 160 research dissertations on terrorism-related subjects
had been carried out. It can reasonably be assumed that this number has further increased since 2001. the
interdependencies between state policy and non-state terrorism and an openly normative, emancipatory praxis in
regards to counter-terrorism. TERRORISM STUDIES: THE STATE OF THE DISCIPLINE Both past and more recent
review exercises of the terrorism studies field have revealed an embarrassing list of methodological and analytical
problems, including: its poor research methods and procedures, particularly its over-reliance on secondary
information and general failure to undertake primary research;4 its failure to develop an accepted definition of
terrorism and subsequent failure to develop rigorous theories and concepts;5 the descriptive, narrative and
condemnatory character of much of its output; its dominance by orthodox international relations approaches and
general lack of inter-disciplinarity; its ahistoricity and} tendency to treat contemporary terrorism as a new
phenomenon that started on September 11, 2001;6 its restricted research focus on a few topical subjects and its
subsequent failure to fully engage with a range of other important topics,7 not least the issue of state terrorism;8
and its strong prescriptive focus9 among others.10 4 Although there are clearly obstacles to primary research in
terms of talking to terrorists, a growing number of studies by scholars such as Jeffrey Sluka, Mia Bloom, John
Horgan, Jessica Stern and others demonstrate that these obstacles are not nearly as insurmountable as some might

failure to engage directly

with the subject of terrorism studies is reflective of their taboo nature and the fear
of contamination. There is a pervasive attitude within some sectors of the field that
understanding terrorist motives equates to sympathising with them and explaining
their behaviour equates to justifying or exonerating it , which is why most terrorism experts
assume. I would argue along with the anthropologist Joseba Zulaika that the

have never met a terrorist. There are few fields of study where the subject is deliberately kept at such great
ontological and moral distance from the researcher than terrorism studies. A typical expression of this taboo comes
from David Jones and M.L.R. Smith who suggest that all efforts by critically-oriented scholars to understand the root
causes of contemporary terrorism or empathise with the injustices which may be driving it confers a legitimacy
which demands empathy and is akin to the toleration of Nazism. Most terrorism scholars have simply abandoned
the search for definition and use the term in their research without defining it. This is a real problem for the field, as
continual debate over key concepts and ideas is critical for theoretical innovation and intellectual progress. The field
tends to focus excessively on a few topical cases, most of which reflect current political concerns. For example, in
recent years, hundreds of studies have been undertaken on Al Qaeda and related forms of Islamic terrorism,
Northern Ireland, the Middle East conflict and issues related to counter-terrorism in the US and UK, such as the role
of the media, suicide terrorism, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) terrorism, cyber-terrorism and terrorist
financing. In part,

the problem is related to the disciplinary and geographical character

of the main scholars in the field, who are generally from international relations 4 However, a much more
serious problem for the field is that it has, for the most part, adopted state-centric priorities and
perspectives on terrorism. Within the literature, terrorism is seen as an illegitimate form of political
violence practiced mainly by non-state actors; moreover, it is viewed as a kind of asymmetric warfare waged
against (mainly democratic) states and societies. It is also viewed as posing a serious, even existential threat to the
survival of liberal democratic states, and thus, extraordinary state counter-terrorism efforts are considered to be de
facto necessary and legitimate. Importantly, it is assumed that one of the key purposes of terrorism studies is to
provide policy-relevant research to aid the authorities in their counter-terrorism campaign. Partly as a consequence
of its inherent state-centricity, there is a tendency by many terrorism scholars to uncritically reproduce a number of
accepted assumptions, narratives and discursive formations, thereby constructing and maintaining a particular kind
of terrorism knowledge. A series of studies on the academic and political discourses of terrorism11 reveals that

the field as a whole tends to continuously reproduce and security studies and based in the
U.S. or the UK. The cause and consequence of this restricted focus is a general failure to fully examine a range of
other important issues, including, among many others: state terrorism; terrorism and the global South; gender and
terrorism; the history of terrorism; and the political causes of terrorism. Few of these subjects have thus far received
sustained attention from scholars in the field or have been studied primarily from within other disciplines. 8 Andrew
Silkes review of 490 articles in the core terrorism studies journals reveals that only 12 or less than two percent of
them examined state terrorism. Silke, The Road Less Travelled, 206. 9 Andrew Silke concludes that much terrorism

research is driven by policy concerns and is limited to government agendas a series of

core assumptions, narratives and discursive formations about terrorism which have subsequently been

accepted as knowledge. For example, a great deal of past and recently published terrorism research
unreflectively takes as its starting point the assumption that terrorism can be understood and studied objectively
and scientifically without political bias. As mentioned, terrorism studies also tends to treat terrorism as primarily a
form of illegitimate non-state political violence; when state terrorism is discussed, it is usually limited to
descriptions of state-sponsored terrorism by so-called rogue states. The deafening silence on the direct use of
terrorism by states within the literature is underpinned by a strong belief that liberal democratic states in particular
never engage in terrorism as a matter of policy, only in error or misjudgement .

The core sustaining

narrative of the field however is that non-state terrorism poses a
significant and existential threat to modern societies and that without
significant investment in counter-terrorism it could be catastrophic to
Western states. This narrative is perhaps unsurprising given the psychological shock engendered by the
September 11, 2001 attacks, as well as the raison detre it provides the field. Related to this, a powerful recent
discursive construction common to terrorism studies is the notion of a new terrorism that is purportedly religiously
motivated, willing to employ weapons of mass destruction and aimed primarily at causing mass casualties. In
addition, much recent research uses terms like religious terrorism and Islamic or Islamist terrorism in ways
that imply an unambiguous and linear causal relationship between forms of Islam and terrorism. Other common
narratives and assumptions within the field include: non-state terrorism is rarely if ever successful, which illustrates
its inherent irrationality; the roots of terrorism lie in individual psychological abnormality and religious or ideological
extremism brought on by radicalisation processes; democratic states are more vulnerable to terrorism because of
their inherent rights and freedoms; the media provides the oxygen of publicity to terrorism; and coercive-based
counter-terrorism is legitimate and effective as a response to campaigns of non-state terrorism. These and other
assumptions and narratives collectively make up a widely accepted knowledge or discourse of terrorism. They are
reproduced continuously in the core terrorism studies journals, in conferences and in hundreds of publications every
year by academics and think-tanks. In addition, they are reproduced culturally and politically through the media,
public debate, education and the arts. The important point is that virtually all of these narratives are overly
simplistic, misconceived and have a weak basis in empirical research; they are in fact, highly debatable.12 There is
not the space here to provide counter-evidence or arguments to all the assumptions and narratives of the
discourse; I have given more detailed first order critique of the dominant terrorism assumptions and narratives
elsewhere.13 It will suffice to discuss a few points which illustrate how unstable and contested this widely accepted
knowledge is. The dominant narratives I have described here are virtually identical to a set of dominant myths
identified in a review of the field from 1979, which is an indication of how persistent and powerful this knowledge is.
First, a number of recent studies have seriously questioned the notion of new terrorism, demonstrating
empirically and through argument that the continuities between new and old terrorism are much greater than
any purported differences. In particular, they show how the assertion that the new terrorism is primarily
motivated by religion is largely unsupported by the evidence.14 Second, an increasing number of studies suggest

that the threat of terrorism to Western or international security is vastly overexaggerated.15 Related to this, a number of scholars have convincingly argued that the
likelihood of terrorists deploying weapons of mass destruction is in fact, miniscule, 16
as is the likelihood that so-called rogue states would provide WMD to terrorists.17 Third, there is no
evidence that terrorism is the result of poverty, educational underachievement,
unemployment or social alienation,18 nor is there any evidence of a terrorist
personality or any discernable psychopathology among individuals involved in
terrorism.19 Most importantly in the current political and moral climate and contrary to widely accepted
knowledge within terrorism studies, every major empirical study has thrown doubt on the notion of a direct causal
link between religion and terrorism, A number of scholars point out that despite tens of thousands of terrorist
attacks over the past four decades, more people have been killed in a single conventional car bomb by the Real IRA
in 1998 than in every terrorist attack using WMD before or since combined. 17 Interestingly, before the September
11, 2001 attacks, many senior officials in the U.S. doubted that rogue states would risk providing WMD to terrorists.
7 particular the link between Islam and terrorism. The Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism for example, which
compiled a database on every case of suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2003, some 315 attacks in all, concluded that
there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the worlds
religions.20 Some of the key findings of the study which support this assessment include: only about half of the
suicide attacks from this period can be associated by group or individual characteristics with Islamic
fundamentalism; the leading practitioners of suicide terrorism are the secular, Marxist-Leninist Tamil Tigers, who
committed 76 attacks; of the 384 individual attackers on which data could be found, only 166 or 43 percent were
religious; there were 41 attacks attributed to Hezbollah during this period, of which 8 were carried out by Muslims,
27 by communists and 3 by Christians (the other 3 attackers could not be identified); and 95 percent of suicide
attacks can be shown to be part of a broader political and military campaign which has a secular and strategic goal,
namely, to end what is perceived as foreign occupation.21 Similarly, Marc Sagemans widely quoted study, in which

he complied detailed biographical data on 172 participants of Islamic terrorist groups, also throws doubt on any
simple causal relationship between religion and terrorism. Some of the key findings of his study include: only 17
percent of the terrorists had an Islamic religious education; only 8 percent of terrorists showed any religious

only 13 percent of terrorists indicated that they were inspired to join

solely on the basis of religious beliefs; increased religious devotion appeared to be an effect of joining
devotion as youths;

the terrorist group, not the cause of it; Islamic terrorist groups do not engage in active recruitment, as there are
more volunteers than they can accommodate; the data, along with five decades of research, failed to provide any
support for the notion of religious brainwashing; and there is no evidence of any individual joining a terrorist
group solely on the basis of exposure to internet-based religious material.22 In short, these findings contradict both
the substance and the tenor of much within the terrorism studies literature. Finally, the notion that terrorism is a
form of political violence practiced primarily by non-state actors is similarly belied by the evidence. The simple fact
is that if terrorism refers to violence directed towards or threatened against civilians which is designed to instill
terror or intimidate a population for political reasons an entirely uncontroversial definition of terrorism and one

state terrorism is arguably of much greater

significance than dissident or non-state terrorism. States after all, have killed,
tortured and intimidated hundreds of millions of people 23 over the past few decades, and a
great many continue to do so today in places Papes findings are supported by recent ethnographic
which is commonly adopted within the literature then

research. Other studies which question the relationship between Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism include:
Stephen Holmes, 2005. Al Qaeda, September 11, 2001, in Diego Gambetta, ed., Making Sense of Suicide
Missions, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Ariel Merari, 1990. The Readiness to Kill and Die: Suicidal Terrorism in the
Middle East, in Walter Reich, ed., Origins of Terrorism, New York: Cambridge University Press; and Ehud Sprinzak,
2000. Rational Fanatics, Foreign Policy, 120: 66-73. 23 A conservative estimate of state-instigated mass murder,
forcible starvations and genocide against civilians suggests that states have been responsible for 170-200 millions
deaths in the twentieth century alone more than all other forms of deadly conflict, including war, combined Over
the past two decades, up to 300,000 people 8 like Colombia, Haiti, Algeria, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Uzbekistan,24
Kashmir, Palestine, Chechnya, Tibet, North Korea, Indonesia, Iraq, the Philippines and elsewhere. Moreover, contrary
to the dominant discourse, the involvement of Western democracies in terrorism has a long but generally ignored
history, which includes: the extensive use of official terror by Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, the U.S. and other
colonial powers in numerous countries throughout the colonial period;25 the practices of strategic bombing during
and since World War II;26 U.S. support and sanctuary for a range of right-wing terrorist groups like the Contras, the
Mujahideen and anti-Castro groups27 during the Cold War, many of whom regularly committed terrorist acts;28 U.S.
tolerance of Irish Republican terrorist activity in the U.S.;29 U.S. support for systematic state terror by numerous
right-wing regimes across the world, perhaps most notoriously El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia and Iran;30
British support for Loyalist have been disappeared worldwide. By comparison, non-state terrorism is responsible
for a few hundred deaths on average per year. The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan reveals the nature and
extent of Uzbek state terror and western complicity in Craig Murray, 2006. Murder in Samarkland: A British
Ambassadors Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror, Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing. Evidence
of the use of terror by the colonial authorities is contained in an extremely large literature on the history and nature
of colonialism, as well as the post-colonialism literature. For more immediately accessible summaries of colonial
terror, see among others Beau Grosscup demonstrates how doctrines of strategic bombing are rooted in the logic
that sowing terror among civilians is an effective and legitimate means of undermining the will of the enemy and
forcing capitulation. U.S. officials admitted as early as 1983 that the Contras were engaged in the killing of civilians,
kidnapping, torture and indiscriminate attacks. It later emerged that a CIA Contra training manual, Psychological
Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, advocated exactly these kinds of civilian-directed proinsurgency tactics. Similar
forms of training were provided through proxies to the Afghan insurgents Ironically, and in a deliberate attempt to
subvert the idea of U.S. support for state terror, many of these regimes received U.S. military assistance under the
auspices of counter-terrorism programmes. terrorism in Northern Ireland31 and various other Islamist groups in
Libya and Bosnia, among other;32 Spanish state terror during the dirty war against ETA;33 French support for terror
in Algeria and against Greenpeace in the Rainbow Warrior bombing; Italian sponsorship of right-wing terrorists; and
Western support for accommodation with terrorists following the end of several high profile wars34 among many
other examples. Western support for terrorism continues today in the form of U.S. military and political support for
various warlords who employ terror against civilians in places like Afghanistan and Somalia, such as the Afghan
warlord, General Dostum,35 and continued U.S. sanctuary and support of anti-Castro terrorists,36 former Latin
American state terrorists37 and other assorted Asian anticommunist groups.38 In short, there is a great deal of
research which contradicts the primary narratives and understandings of terrorism studies and demonstrates that
much of the primary assumptions and knowledge of the field is overly simplistic, misconceived, incorrect or heavily
biased.39 The point is not to establish an alternative final truth about terrorism, but simply to draw attention to the
inherent instabilities of the dominant narratives.40 A key question which follows is how these assumptions and
narratives have come be accepted as established knowledge and commonsense when they are in fact so contested,
and why they continue to hold such sway over the field.

A2 K2 Data
Racial surveillance causes data overload doesnt solve their
internal link and can only result in failed strategies
ACLU 15 (ACLU. Surveillance by Other Agencies. 2015.
https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/privacy-and-surveillance/surveillanceother-agencies)//EMerz
Surveillance is not just the province of the National Security Agency or CIAit is
now conducted by a broad array of federal and state agencies. The FBI is collecting
racial and ethnic information and mapping minority American communities
around the country based on crude stereotypes about which groups commit
different types of crimes. The Transportation Security Association (TSA) employs
thousands of behavior detection officers who scan passengers in the screening
areas of airports for signs of deception or mal-intenta program that the
governments own watchdog has concluded is based on junk science and is a waste
of money. Law enforcement agencies nationwide gather reports from government
agencies and the public on innocent Americans so-called suspicious activities and
share them with unknown numbers of federal, state, and local government
agencies. The ACLU is pushing back against this rising tide of surveillance through
litigation, Freedom of Information Act requests, advocacy for meaningful oversight,
and campaigns to raise public awareness about unlawful and discriminatory
government surveillance. Unchecked spying on Americans not only invades their
privacy but also floods law enforcement agencies with useless information on
innocent activity, making their jobs harder. It makes us neither safe nor free.

A2 Theyll Get Over It

Since 9/11 terrorism has increased -- blowback from
imperialism is not sustainable
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 40//ejh)
Since 9/11, the number of significant terrorist incidents has grown and increased in
intensity. These include the attempt on December 22, 2001, by Richard Reid, a
British citizen, to blow up a Miami-bound jet using an explosive device hidden in his
shoe; the bombing on October 12, 2002, of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, killing 202
vacationers, most of them Australians; the May 13, 2003, explosions at three
residential compounds and the offices of an American defense contractor in Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia; the killings three days later, on May 16, 2003, of some 33 people at a
restaurant and Jewish community center in Casablanca, Morocco; the use of a car
bomb on August 5, 2003, to attack the new Marriott Hotel, a symbol of American
imperialism, in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital; the deaths of at least 19 people in an
explosion at the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, August 7, 2003; and the blowing up
of the United Nations compound in Baghdad on August 19, 2003, killing Sergio
Vieira de Mello, the secretary generals special representative, and many others.
There have also been numerous assassinations of American officials and business
people around the world and 184 American service personnel died in Iraq in the six
months since May 1, 2003, when President Bush ostentatiously declared that the
war was over.13
Beyond terrorism, the danger I foresee is that we are embarked on a path not so
dissimilar from that of the former Soviet Union a little more than a decade ago. It
collapsed for three reasonsinternal economic contradictions, imperial overstretch,
and an inability to reform. In every sense, we were by far the wealthier of the two
Cold War superpowers, so it will certainly take longer for similar afflictions to do
their work. But it is nowhere written that the United States, in its guise as an empire
dominating the world, must go on forever. The blowback from the second half of the
twentieth century has only just begun.

The war on terror incited profound violence and destroyed U.S.

legitimacy the wars in Afghan and Iraq deteriorated the
conditions of both countries, costing thousands of lives,
throwing the countries in to chaos and allowing the escape of
many Taliban and al Queda leaders
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 32//ejh)
Instead, in the wake of 9/11, the United States came up with a particularly cynical
and destructive strategy. It sent CIA agents to Afghanistan with millions of dollars to
bribe the same warlord armies that the Taliban had defeated to reopen the civil war,

promising them air support in their new offensive. The warlords, with a bit of help
from the United States, thus overthrew the Taliban government and soon returned
to their old ways of regional exploitation. Afghanistan descended into an anarchy
comparable to that which prevailed before the rise of the ruthless but religiously
motivated Taliban. The propaganda apparatus of the Pentagon claimed a
stupendous U.S. victory in Afghanistan, but, in fact, leaders of the Taliban and alQaeda escaped and the country quickly became an even more virulent breeding
ground for terrorists.
In the first year after Afghanistans liberation, the production of opium, heroin,
and morphine, controlled by Americas warlord allies, increased 18-fold, from 185 to
3,400 tons. Even British prime minister Tony Blair admitted in January 2003 that 90
percent of the heroin consumed in Britain came from Afghanistan.10 Previously
vacillating supporters of terrorists have been drawn into militant organizations.
Muslim governments that in the past have cooperated with the United States,
especially Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Indonesia, and Pakistan, are facing growing internal
dissent. In most of the world, the spectacle of the worlds richest and most heavily
armed country using its air power against one of the worlds poorest quickly eroded
the moral high ground accorded to the United States as the victim of the September
11 attacks. Our preventive wars insured that Afghans, Iraqis, and their supporters
will have ample motives long into the future to kill any and all Americans,
particularly innocent ones, just as the American military slaughtered their civilians
with its shock and awe bombing campaigns against which there is no defense.

2ac vs Heg Good

Bilgin
Top-down approach/Imperialism has empirically failedleads to
instability and violence, and justifies extreme domestic policies
that re-entrench Islamophobia
Bilgin, 4professor at Bilkent University, PhD in International Politics from the
University of Wales (Pinar, Whose Middle East? Geopolitical Inventions and
Practices of Security, http://www.arts.yorku.ca/politics/ncanefe/docs/readings%20for
%20the%20curious%20mind/Pinar%20Bilgin%20on%20Whose%20Middle
%20East.pdf, pg. 3-5)//twemchen
The significance of conceiving the relationship between regions and security as mutually constitutive becomes more explicit once

the Middle East has developed to its present condition partly due to the
way it has been represented by the dominant security discourses. Throughout the
20th century representations of the Middle East (in foreign policy- and opinion-makers discourses as well as in
popular culture)15 have underwritten certain security practices that were deemed fit for the
character of the region. In other words, the current state of (in)security in the Middle
East has its roots in practices that have been informed by its representation. What shaped
this particular dominant representation, in turn, was the conception of security in which it
was rooted. It is in this sense that having a better grasp of what Simon Dalby calls the politics of the geographical
one recognizes that

specification of politics16 becomes crucial, for it enables one to begin thinking differently about the future of security in the Middle
East while remaining sensitive to security concerns and needs of myriad actors that propound contending perspectives. Having
traced the development of the Middle East (as a concept and as a region) back to security policies of late 19th-century Britain, the
following sections will turn to four contending perspectives on regional security that developed during the Cold War years (the
Middle East, Arab Middle East, Muslim Middle East and Mediterranean Middle East) each one of which give primacy to different

Critical Security
Studies need to pay attention to regional peoples conceptions of security; what they view
kinds of threats.17 It will be argued that when rethinking regional security in the Middle East, students of

as the referent; and how they think security should be established in this part of the world. The aim is to show how difficult it is to
generalize about questions of security; how peoples ideas about security differ from one another; and how they changed in the past

this amounts to amplifying the voices

of those whose views have been left out of security analyses and pointing to
possibilities for change that exist. This is not meant to suggest that these alternatives should not be put under
and might change in the future. Within the context of the Middle East

critical scrutiny. The role of students of Critical Security Studies should not be merely to represent those views that have so far been
marginalized by the dominant approaches, but also to critically analyse them. To adopt a relativist perspective and argue that all
approaches voice the concerns of their proponents and are therefore equally valid is not helpful (especially if one is interested in
pointing to possible avenues for change). It is even less desirable in places like the Middle East where contending conceptions of
security often clash. A striking example of this can be found in Israel/Palestine. Peace is my security is what a PeaceNow activists
banner read when celebrating the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993.18 But peace with security has long been the motto of those
Israelis sceptical of the virtues of an ArabIsraeli peace agreement. Rather, the role of the student of Critical Security Studies is to
adopt a critical distance,19 to anchor 20 him/herself by being self-conscious and open about other versions of reality and by
reflecting upon his/her own role as an intellectual and the effects of the research on its subject matter.21 Within the Middle Eastern
context this involves being sensitive towards conceptions of security adopted by the regions peoples, representing the ideas and
experiences of those who have been marginalized by the dominant discourses and drawing up an alternative template for thinking
about regional security that promotes emancipatory practices. This will be the focus of the final section of the article. The Middle
East What I call the Middle East perspective is usually associated with the United States and its regional allies. It derives from a
western conception of security which could be summed up as the unhindered flow of oil at reasonable prices, the cessation of the
ArabIsraeli conflict, the prevention of the emergence of any regional hegemon while holding Islamism in check, and the

a topdown conception
of security that privileged the security of states and military stability. It is top-down because
threats to security have been defined largely from the perspective of external powers rather
than regional states or peoples. In the eyes of British and US defence planners , Communist infiltration
and Soviet intervention constituted the greatest threat to security in the Middle East during the Cold
War. The way to enhance regional security, they argued, was for regional states to
enter into alliances with the West . Two security umbrella schemes, the ill-born Middle East Defence Organisation
maintenance of friendly regimes that are sensitive to these concerns. This was (and still is)

(1951) and the Baghdad Pact (1955), were designed for this purpose. Although there were regional states such as Iraq (until the
1958 coup), Iran (until the 19789 revolution) and Turkey that shared this perception of security to a certain extent, many Arab

policy-makers begged to differ.22 Traces of this top-down thinking were prevalent in the US approach to security in the Middle East
during the 1990s. In following a policy of dual containment,23 US policy-makers presented Iran and Iraq as the main threats to
regional security largely due to their military capabilities and the revisionist character of their regimes that are not subservient to US
interests. However, these top-down perspectives, while revealing certain aspects of regional insecurity, at the same time hinder
others. For example the lives of women in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are made insecure not only by the threat caused by their Gulf
neighbours military capabilities, but also because of the conservative character of their own regimes that restrict womens rights
under the cloak of religious tradition.24 For it is women who suffer disproportionately as a result of militarism and the channelling of
valuable resources into defence budgets instead of education and health. Their concerns rarely make it into security analyses.

This top-down approach to regional security in the Middle East was compounded by a conception
of security that was directed outwards that is threats to security were assumed to
stem from outside the state whereas inside is viewed as a realm of peace. Although it
could be argued following R.B.J. Walker that what makes it possible for inside to remain peaceful is the presentation of outside
as a realm of danger,25 the practices of Middle Eastern states indicate that this does not always work as prescribed in theory.

For

many regional policy-makers justify certain domestic security measures by

way of presenting the international arena as anarchical and stressing the need to
strengthen the state to cope with external threats. While doing this, however, they
at the same time cause insecurity for some individuals and social groups at
home the very peoples whose security they purport to maintain. The practices of regional
actors that do not match up to the theoretical prescriptions include the Baath regime in Iraq that infringed their own citizens rights
often for the purposes of state security. Those who dare to challenge their states security practices may be marginalized at best,
and accused of treachery and imprisoned at worst. The military priority of security thinking in the Cold War manifested itself within
the Middle Eastern context by regional as well as external actors reliance on practices such as heavy defence outlays, concern with
orders-of-battle, joint military exercises and defence pacts. For example, the British and US security practices during this period took
the form of defending regional states against external intervention by way of helping them to strengthen their defences and
acquiring military bases in the region as well as bolstering friendly regimes stronghold over their populace so that the Middle East
would become inviolable to Soviet infiltration and intervention.

Butler
The deeming of people as dangerous creates a free license
for capture that drives perpetual warfare
Butler 6, Professor at UC Berkeley
(Judith, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence Ch. 3: Indefinite Detention, pg 50)

If a person is simply deemed dangerous, then it is no longer a matter of deciding

whether criminal acts occurred. Indeed, "deeming" someone dangerous is an
unsubstantiated judgment that in these cases works to preempt determinations for which evidence is
required. The license to brand and categorize and detain on the basis of suspicion
alone, expressed in this operation of "deeming," is potentially enormous. We have already seen
it at work in racial profiling, in the detention of thousands of Arab residents or ArabAmerican citizens, sometimes on the basis of last names alone; the harassment
of any number of US and non-US citizens at the immi- gration borders because some
official "perceives" a potential difficulty; the attacks on individuals of Middle Eastern descent
on US streets, and the targeting of Arab-American professors on campuses . When
Rumsfeld has sent the US into periodic panics or "alerts," he has not told the population what to look out for, but

This objectless panic translates too

quickly into suspicion of all dark-skinned peoples, especially those who are Arab , or
appear to look so to a population not always well versed in making visual
distinctions, say, between Sikhs and Muslims or, indeed, Sephardic or Arab Jews and
Pakistani- Americans. Although "deeming" someone dangerous is considered a
state prerogative in these discussions, it is also a potential license for prejudicial perception
and a virtual mandate to heighten racialized ways of looking and judging in the
name of national security. A population of Islamic peoples, or those taken to be
Islamic, has become targeted by this government mandate to be on
heightened alert, with the effect that the Arab population in the US becomes
visually rounded up, stared down, watched, hounded and monitored by a group of
citizens who understand themselves as foot soldiers in the war against terrorism .
only to have a heightened awareness of suspicious activity.

What kind of public culture is being created when a certain "indefinite containment" takes place outside the prison
walls, on the subway, in the airports, on the street, in the workplace? A falafel restaurant run by Lebanese
Christians that does not exhibit the American flag becomes immediately suspect, as if the failure to fly the flag in
the months following September Il, zooi were a sign of sympathy with al-Qaeda, a deduction that has no

it is the person,
or the people, who are deemed dangerous, and no dangerous acts need to be
proven to establish this as true, then the state constitutes the detained
population unilaterally, taking them out of the jurisdiction of the law,
depriving them of the legal protections to which subjects under national
and international law are entitled. These are surely populations that are not
regarded as subjects, humans who are not conceptualized within the frame of a
political culture in which human lives are underwritten by legal entitlements, law,
and so humans who are not humans . We saw evidence for this derealization of the
human in the photos of the shackled bodies in Guantanamo released by the Department
of Defense. The DOD did not hide these photos, but published them openly. My speculation is that they
published these photographs to make known that a certain vanquishing had taken
place, the reversal of national humiliation, a sign of a successful vindication. These were
justification, but which nevertheless ruled public culture-and business interests_at that time. If

not photographs leaked to the press by some human rights agency or concerned media enterprise. So the

international response was no doubt disconcerting, since instead of moral triumph, many people, British
parliamentarians and European human rights activists among them, saw serious moral failure. Instead of
vindication, many saw instead revenge, cruelty, and a nationalist and self-satisfied flouting of international

there is
something more in this degradation that calls to be read. There is a reduction of
these human beings to animal status, where the animal is figured as out of
control, in need of total restraint. It is important to remember that the
bestialization of the human in this way has little , if anything, to do with actual
animals, since it is a figure of the animal against which the human is defined . Even if,
convention. So that several countries asked that their citizens be returned home for trial. But

as seems most probable, some or all of these people have violent intentions, have been engaged in violent acts,

The
language with which they are described by the US , however, suggests that these
individuals are exceptional, that they may not be individuals at all, that they must
be constrained in order not to kill, that they are effectively reducible to a desire to
kill, and that regular criminal and international codes cannot apply to
beings such as these. The treatment of these prisoners is considered as an
extension of war itself, not as a postwar question of appropriate trial and punishment. Their detention stops the killing. If they were not detained, and forcibly so
when any movement is required, they would appar- ently start killing on the spot ;
they are beings who are in a permanent and perpetual war. It may be that aland murderous ones, there are ways to deal with murderers under both criminal and international law.

Qaeda representatives speak this way-some clearly do-but that does not mean that every individual detained
embodies that position, or that those detained are centrally concerned with the continuation of war. Indeed, recent

some of the detainees were

only tangentially or transiently involved in the war effort ." Other reports in the spring of 2003
reports, even from the investigative team in Guantanamo, suggest that

made clear that some detainees are minors, ranging from ages thirteen to sixteen. Even General Dunlavey, who
admitted that not all the detainees were killers, still claimed that the risk is too high to release such detainees.
Rumsfeld cited in support of forcible detention the prison uprisings in Afghanistan in which prisoners managed to

In this sense, the war is not, and cannot

be, over; there is a chance of battle in the prison , and there is a warrant for physical
restraint, such that the postwar prison becomes the continuing site of war. It would
seem that the rules that govern combat are in place, but not the rules that govern the
proper treatment of prisoners separated from the war itself. When General Counsel Haynes
get hold of weapons and stage a battle inside the prison.

was asked, "So you could in fact hold these people for years without charging them, simply to keep them off the
street, even if you don't charge them?" he replied, " We

are within our rights, and I don't think

anyone disputes it that we may hold enemy combatants for the duration of the
conflict. And the confiict is still going and we don 'z see an erm' in sig/zz right now"
(my emphasis). | 1 If the war is against terrorism, and the definition of terrorism expands to include every
questionable instance of global difficulty, how can the war end? Is it, by definition, a war without end, given
the lability of the terms "terrorism" and "war"? Although the pictures were published as a sign of US triumph, and
so apparently indicating a conclusion to the war effort, it was clear at the time that bombing and armed confiict

the war was not over, and even the photographs, the
degradation, and the indefinite detention were continuing acts of war. Indeed, war
seems to have established a more or less permanent condition of national
emergency, and the sovereign right to self-protection outfianks any and
all recourse to law.
were continuing in Afghanistan,

Lifton
The preservation hegemony is symptomatic of an obsession
with control --- this drive results in extinction
Lifton, 3Visiting Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, previously
Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Graduate School and
Director of The Center on Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College of
Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, 2003 (Robert Jay, Superpower
Syndrome: Americas Apocalyptic Confrontation With The World, Published by
Thunders Mouth Press / Nation Books, ISBN 1560255129, p. 1-4)//twemchen
The apocalyptic imagination has spawned a new kind of violence at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We can, in fact, speak

a worldwide epidemic of violence aimed at massive destruction in the service

of various visions of purification and renewal. In particular, we are experiencing what
could be called an apocalyptic face-off between Islamist* forces, overtly visionary in
their willingness to kill and die for their religion, and American forces claiming to be
restrained and reasonable but no less visionary in their projection of a cleansing warmaking and military power. Both sides are [end page 1] energized by versions of intense idealism; both see
themselves as embarked on a mission of combating evil in order to redeem and renew the
of

world; and both are ready to release untold levels of violence to achieve that purpose. The war on Iraqa country with longstanding
aspirations toward weapons of mass destruction but with no evident stockpiles of them and no apparent connection to the assaults
of September 11was a manifestation of that American visionary projection. The religious fanaticism of Osama bin Laden and other
Islamist zealots has, by now, a certain familiarity to us as to others elsewhere, for their violent demands for spiritual purification are
aimed as much at fellow Islamics as at American infidels. Their fierce attacks on the defilement that they believe they see
everywhere in contemporary life resemble those of past movements and sects from all parts of the world; such sects, with end-ofthe-world prophecies and devout violence in the service of bringing those prophecies about, flourished in Europe from the eleventh
through the sixteenth century. Similar sects like the fanatical Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which released sarin gas into the Tokyo

The American apocalyptic entity is

less familiar to us. Even if its urges to power and domination seem historically recognizable, it nonetheless
represents a new constellation of forces bound up with what Ive come to think of [end page 2] as
superpower syndrome. By that term I mean a national mindsetput forward strongly by a
tight-knit leadership groupthat takes on a sense of omnipotence, of unique
standing in the world that grants it the right to hold sway over all other nations. The American superpower status
subways in 1995, have existedeven proliferatedin our own time.

derives from our emergence from World War II as uniquely powerful in every respect, still more so as the only superpower left

More than merely dominate, the American

superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is
accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement , of special dispensation to pursue its aims.
standing at the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.

That
entitlement stems partly from historic claims to special democratic virtue, but has much to do with an embrace of technological
power translated into military terms. That is, a superpowerthe worlds only superpoweris entitled to dominate and control
precisely because it is a superpower. The murderous events of 9/11 hardened that sense of entitlement as nothing else could have.
Superpower syndrome did not require 9/11, but the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon rendered us an aggrieved

at the core of
superpower syndrome lies a powerful fear of vulnerability. A superpowers
victimization brings on both a sense of humiliation and an angry determination to
restore, or even extend, the boundaries of a superpower-dominated world . Integral to superpower
superpower, a giant violated and made vulnerable, which no superpower can permit. Indeed,

syndrome are its menacing nuclear stockpiles and their world-destroying capacity. Throughout the decades of the Cold War, the
United States and the Soviet Union both lived with a godlike nuclear capacity to obliterate the cosmos, along with a fear of being
annihilated by the enemy power. Now America alone possesses that world-destroying capacity, and post-Soviet Russia no longer
looms as a nuclear or superpower adversary. We have yet to grasp the full impact of this exclusive capacity to blow up anyone or

The confrontation between Islamist

and American versions of planetary excess has unfortunately tended to define a
world in which the vast majority of people embrace neither. But apocalyptic excess
needs no majority to dominate a landscape. All the more so when, in their mutual zealotry, Islamist and
everything, but its reverberations are never absent in any part of the world.

That is, each, in its excess, nurtures the apocalypticism of

the other, resulting in a malignant synergy. * In keeping with general usage, Islamist refers to groups that
American leaders seem to act in concert.

are essentially theocratic and fundamentalist, and at times apocalyptic. Islamic is a more general ethnic as well as religious term for
Muslims. The terms can of course overlap, and Islamic state can mean one run on Islamist principles.

RCWar
Imperialism is founded on secret, militaristic claims that justifies
endless international conflict and produces poor knowledge
production
Rule, 10PhD from Harvard, MA from Oxford University, BA from Brandeis (James
B, Winter 2010, The Military State of America and the Democratic Left, Dissent
Vol. 57 No 1)//twemchen
At this moment, for example, in 1 984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with
Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped
along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with
Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to
possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. We are not there, but the direction of movement

shrewd state manipulation of strategic

information makes it possible to defuse criticism and discredit public
skepticism, until it is too late. Many trends since Orwell's lifetime have aggravated the hazards that he
anticipated. One is globalism - the growth of an ever-moretightly connected world, so that people, ideas,
technologies, and even weapons move about the earth more and more readily. Such
is unmistakable. As the Iraq adventure has demonstrated,

conditions can facilitate terrorism, conceivably on a scale well beyond what the world has yet witnessed. On the

we see the rise of vast bureaucracies dealing in essentially

secret knowledge - intelligence about military matters and a host of other subjects held vital to
national security, yet supposedly too sensitive for public disclosure. Mobilization of
such knowledge in turn requires a high-tech establishment of civilian and military experts
whose activities cannot readily be monitored by outsiders. One result is that government
claims about matters of vital public concern, from weapons of mass destruction to terrorist dangers, are
not easily challenged in public debate. As Orwell warned, the state may change the menu of
state side of the equation,

deadly enemies from year to year but continue the same strictures on public inquiry and dissent. A few decades
ago, Iraq was America's ally; more lately, it reappeared as part of the axis of evil. China rises and falls in
Washington's official designations - sometimes a feared twenty-first-century competitor, more recently an ally in the
quest for Asian "stability" and indispensable supporter of the U.S. economy. Pakistan under its last dictator was a
stalwart participant in the so-called War on Terror. But that country could any day be redefined (with some

Who can say with confidence what demonic

qualities will be ascribed, perhaps quite accurately, to any of America's present-day allies, with the
next shake of this country's foreign-policy kaleidoscope ? And who can say what new military
exploits, or domestic restrictions, will be proclaimed essential to repress these demons of the future? The one
thing we can be sure of is that the supply of ugly movements and regimes around
the world shows no sign of running short. If their sheer presence suffices to justify a
hypermilitarized America and concomitant suppression of countervailing voices in
domestic life, we are embarked on a long journey in the direction of 1984. There has to be a better way - as we
justification) as a threat to the civilized world.

on the democratic Left should be the first to proclaim. In a dangerous world, any course of action bears risks. No

a steady diet of aggressive American military

action abroad might forestall disasters yet unseen. Nor can anyone deny that relentless
surveillance of domestic communications, or invocation of national security to rebuff all
challenges to the exercise of government power could, conceivably, help block further terrorist
acts on U.S. soil. But nor, for that matter, can anyone authoritatively deny that such measures might
actually make matters much worse.
one can absolutely rule out the possibility that

RCTerror
The terrorist threat is caused by attempted U.S. leadership
controlling the world through military might and policies
removed from an informed public
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 272//ejh)
Military might does not equate with leadership of the free world. It is also no
substitute for an informed public that understands and has approved the policies
being carried out in its name. An excessive reliance on a militarized foreign policy
and an indifference to the distinction between national interests and national values
in deciding where the United States should intervene abroad have actually made
the country less secure in ways that will become only more apparent in the years to
come.
What would make the United States more secure is not more money spent on JCET
teams or espionage satellites to find and retaliate against terrorists. Instead, the
United States should bring most of its overseas land-based forces home and
reorient its foreign policy to stress leadership through example and diplomacy.
Nowhere is this more true than on the Korean peninsula. American military
intervention in Korea dates back to 1945. Most of our commitments in Korea were
made before current government leaders were even born. The passage of time,
economic development, and the collapse of communism have rendered most of
them utterly anachronistic. Yet they remain unchanged, constituting one of our
greatest breeding grounds for blowback.

U.S. foreign policy is designed to perpetuate Cold War

justifications for imperialism absent the Cold War the
continuation of these policies will only garner resentment
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 69,70//ejh)
I believe it is past time for such a discussion to begin, for Americans to consider why
we have created an empirea word from which we shy awayand what the
consequences of our imperial stance may be for the rest of the world and for
ourselves. Not so long ago, the way we garrisoned the world could be discussed far
more openly and comfortably because the explanation seemed to lie at handin
the very existence of the Soviet Union and of communism. Had the Italian disaster
occurred two decades earlier, it would have seemed no less a tragedy, but many
Americans would have argued that, given the Cold War, such incidents were an
unavoidable cost of protecting democracies like Italy against the menace of Soviet
totalitarianism. With the disappearance of any military threat faintly comparable to
that posed by the former Soviet Union, such costs have become easily avoidable.

American military forces could have been withdrawn from Italy, as well as from
other foreign bases, long ago. That they were not and that Washington instead is
doing everything in its considerable powers to perpetuate Cold War structures , even
without the Cold Wars justification, places such overseas deployments in a new
light. They have become striking evidence, for those who care to look, of an
imperial project that the Cold War obscured . The byproducts of this project are likely
to build up reservoirs of resentment against all Americans tourists, students, and
businessmen, as well as members of the armed forcesthat can have lethal results.

American ideologies serve to conceal American Imperialism

the war against terror is only one expression of the U.S. vision
of control that serves to maintain it
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 102//ejh)
What, then, of the very idea of an American empire or, for that matter, American
imperialism? Hegemony, empire, and imperialism have often been used as
epithets or fighting words. They lie at the heart of Marxs and, especially, Lenins
condemnation of capitalism. During the Cold War, Communists asserted that
imperialism was one of the contradictions of capitalism and hence a root cause of
class struggle, revolution, and war. However, the terms also evoke images of the
Roman and British empires, as well as of the Pax Romana and the Pax Britannica
that were said to have accompanied them. Imperialism is further associated with
the racism and exploitation that accompanied European, American, and Japanese
colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and with the violent reactions
to it that dominated the non-Western world in the wake of the Second World War.
In speaking of an American empire, however, I am not using the concept in these
traditional senses. I am not talking about the United States former colony in the
Philippines, or about such dependent territories as Puerto Rico; nor when I use the
term imperialism in this book do I mean the extension of one states legal
dominion over another; nor do I even want to imply that imperialism must have
primarily economic causes. The more modern empires I have in mind normally lie
concealed beneath some ideological or juridical conceptcommonwealth, alliance,
free world, the West, the Communist blocthat disguises the actual relationships
among its members.

EpistReject tha MIC

Their evidence are just an apparatus of the military-industrial
complex
Connolly, 5professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University (William
E., The Media and Think Tank Politics, Theory & Event, Vol.8, Issue 4, Johns
Hopkins University Press)//twemchen
the think tank/ military/state network organized to locate, decipher, and fight
terrorists has become too much like the enemy it defines. While the usual division between
liberal and conservative categories does not work well to outline this danger, the authors also do not mimic the
voice of neutrality and objectification that think-tank analyses purport to provide. Instead of objectifying
the enemy and seeking keys to manipulate domestic constituencies in predictable ways, they
seek to expose, to engage, and to align themselves with constituencies who are concerned
about the tenor of contemporary politics. My point here is that the authors should articulate
closely and explicitly the perspective from which this machine is appraised, particularly
The point is that

since the standard of appraisal does not fit neatly into the slots provided by liberal think tank perspectives and conservative think
tank perspectives. 3. Moreover, the electronic news media must be folded more closely into an analysis of the state/military/think
tank network. If the military has hesitated to take the lead in identifying domestic enemies and mobilizing popular energies -- a

The twenty-four hour news channels are

now regularly visited by retired generals, intelligence experts and representatives
from right wing think tanks. They provide a continuous focus on potential terrorist
threats, readiness to swamp other news with these concerns, cheer leaders for
military invasions, and readiness to minimize the Falluja massacre, Abu Ghraib and the Guantanamo Gulag. They now form
a constitutive part of the complex described in the "Network" piece. 4. Media politics is neocortical politics,
a politics that often helps to plant visceral seeds of fear on the lower registers of the
body/brain/culture network and then harvests those plants later when it is time to twist the
terrorist threat in favor of Bush domestic and foreign policies that in fact have little to do with
it. 5. And electoral politics is infused with the same techniques. What moderate or liberal talk shows -- besides "The Daily Show" -reluctance that is now on the wane -- there is an indirect route.

exposes how the image-word-rhythm sound campaign of the Bush administration worked, how it resonated with the underlying
proclivities of its core constituencies, and how the code adopted enabled its authors to retain a modicum of deniability to other
voters not paying close attention. Forget the "Swift Boat" ads for now, probably orchestrated by some of the consultants highlighted
in the "Network" essay. Consider the recurrent media image of a masculine, steadfast President with his sleeves rolled up,
juxtaposed to that of the opponent feminized as a flip-flopping, French loving dandy. The dandy tacks back and forth on a wind
surfer while the voice-over charts his changing positions on issues. The implicit contrast is to masculine, steadfast military leaders,
right wing talk show hosts, and tough think tank analysts always one step ahead of the non-state enemy. This media machine first
implicitly ratifies the demeaning characterization of women already extant in the evangelical movement, corporate boardrooms and
military clubs, and then slaps Kerry with that demeaning characterization. In this subcortical politics the line of image/word/sound
associations is never articulated; and it is not exposed elsewhere either because no feminist leaders were invited to decode how the
message works, what constituencies it demeans, and the needed traits of reflexive thoughtfulness it denigrates. The mentality and
tactics of tough guy think tanks are thus carried into the media, and vice versa. That flip-flop is aided by the fact that media
consultants and think tank experts are in regular communication. In this and innumerable other ways the news media have become
the echo chamber of the think tank machine that now feeds them. The neocortical politics of think tanks would be nothing without

this machine is designed to promote a centered, nationalist

agenda. It does so by identifying terrorism with an entire civilization and
legitimizing a host of responses to carriers of that "civilization" which might
otherwise not be acceptable to the public. "We" are radically unlike all of "them".
this partner. 6. Morever,

Abu
Ghraib, the Falluja massacre and the Guantanamo Gulag are recent results of such a politics of belligerent nationalization aimed at

domestic politics edges toward "a

transcendental dimension" with its perpetrators increasingly "unconstrained
overgeneralized enemies. In such a subcortical machine

political, moral or practical constraints" previously folded into domestic politics.

by the

A discussion of Americas global role is a prerequisite to peace

only through promoting decision making and awareness
outside of military planners can we prevent irreversible
damage
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 134//ejh)
The United States today desperately needs a new analysis of its role in a postCold
War world and of the sorts of policies that might prevent another major war, like its
last three, in East Asia. Some of the significant changes to come in East Asia are
already visible: Chinas increasing attempt to emulate high-growth economies
elsewhere in Asia; the reunification of Korea; Japans need to overcome its political
paralysis; Americas confusion over how to adjust to a self-confident China and to a
more independent Japan; the growing importance of Southeast Asia as a new
economic center of gravity. American policy making needs to be taken away from
military planners and military-minded civilians, including those in the White House,
who today dominate Washington policy making toward the area. American
ambassadors and diplomats in Asia should have at least an elementary knowledge
of East Asian history, languages, and aspirations. The United States desperately
needs options for dealing with crises other than relying on the carrier task force,
cruise missiles, and the unfettered flow of capital, just as it needs to overcome the
complacency and arrogance that characterize American official attitudes toward
Asia today.
Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order to draw attention to the sins
of the invulnerable. The innocent of the twenty-first century are going to harvest
unexpected blowback disasters from the imperialist escapades of recent decades.
Although most Americans may be largely ignorant of what was, and still is, being
done in their names, all are likely to pay a steep priceindividually and collectively
for their nations continued efforts to dominate the global scene. Before the
damage of heedless triumphalist acts and the triumphalist rhetoric and propaganda
that goes with them becomes irreversible, it is important to open a new discussion
of our global role during and after the Cold War. There is no place more appropriate
to begin a reconsideration of Americas imperial policies than with American
behavior in East Asia.

A2 Benign Hegemon
The War on Terror relies on the constructed image of the
Other against the dignified and moral force of US hegemony
recreates violence, biopower, and colonialism
Crowe, 7researcher at York Centre for International and Security Studies, York
University, (L.A., "The Fuzzy Dream: Discourse, Historical myths, and Militarized
(in)Security - Interrogating dangerous myths of Afghanistan and the West",
www.eisa-net.org/be-bruga/eisa/files/events/turin/Crowe-loricrowe.pdf)//twemchen
These elements of oppositional binaries is closely related to the second element: contemporary discourse has developed from and
further perpetuates a particular ideology that emmanates from a neo-liberal capitalist and imperial agenda that is founded upon
neo-colonialist attitudes and assumptions. The

US campaign to fight terrorism, initiated after September

11th explains Nahla Abdo has crystallized all the ideological underpinnings of colonial and
imperial policies towards the constructed other.82 This emerges in the
heroism myth mentioned above; for example, Debrix explains how narratives around humanitarianism serve an
ideological purpose in that it contributes to the reinforcement of neoliberal policies in pathological regions of the international

neoliberal globalisation relies on the

institutionalization of neo-colonialism and the commodification and (re)colonization of labor
via militarized strategies of imperial politics. That is, as Agathangelou and Ling point out, Neoliberal
landscape.83 It also emerges in the militarization myth, insofar as

economics enables globalized militarization.84 Embedded in this normalization of neo-colonial frames are the elements of linearity
and thus assumed rationality of reasoning in the West. As Canada stepped up its role in direct combat operations (which included an
increase of combat troops, fighter jets, and tanks with long-range firing capacities85), Stephen Harper appealed to troop morale on
the ground in Afghanistan, stating: Canada and the international community are determined to take a failed state and create a
"democratic, prosperous and modern country."86 (my italics) Proposed solutions to the conflict(s) in Afghanistan have been framed
and justified not only as saving backwards Afghanistan but also as generously bringing it into the modern, capitalist, neoliberal
age. Moreover, this element represents an continuity of colonial power, presenting the one correct truth or resolution, emmanating

Representations of Afghanistan present

Western voices as the authority and the potential progress such authority can bring to the East as
naturally desirable. This rationality also presumes an inherent value of Western
methodology (including statistical analysis, quantification of data, etc) and devalues alternative
epistemologies including those of the Afghan people. This is problematic for several reasons: 1) It
forecloses and discourages thinking outside the box and instead relies upon the
masters tools which include violent military force, the installation of a democratic regime,
from the objective gaze of the problem-solving Western world.

peacekeeping, and reconstruction and foreign aid alternative strategies are deemed radical, unworkable, and anti-American;

2) it prioritizes numbers and statitistics over lived experiences . By relying on tallies

of deaths, percetages of voters, and numbers of insurgents for example, the experiences of those living in the region are obfuscated

3)it reproduces a colonial hierarchy of knowledge production .

Old colonial narratives of have re-surfaced with renewed vigor in the case of Afghanistan is contingent on
and mutually reinforced by opposing narratives of a civilized and developed
West. For example: Consider the language which is being usedCalling the perpetrators evildoers, irrational, calling them the
and devalued, and;

forces of darkness, uncivilized, intent on destroying civilization, intent on destroying democracy. They hate freedom, we are told.
Every person of colour, and I would want to say also every Aboriginal person, will recognize that language. The language of us

This
colonizer/colonized dichotomy is key to the civilisational justification the US
administration pursues (We wage war to save civilization itself88) which, as Agathangelou and Ling explain, is
versus them, of civilization versus the forces of darkness, this language is rooted in the colonial legacy.87

motivated by a constructed medieval evil that threatens American freedom and democracy, the apotheosis of modern civilization,
and therefore must be disciplined/civilized. In his Speech to Congress on September 21, 2001, Bush portrays the irrational Other as
Evil and retributive seeking to destroy the developed, secure prosperous and civilized free world: These terrorists kill not merely
to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of lifeAl Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making money;

This production of othering

and re-institutionalization of colonial discourse has been enabled by and facilitated
culture clash explanations.90 The danger of such theories, warns Razack, lies not only in
its goal is remaking the world, and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere.89

their decontextualization and dehistoricization, but also on its reliance on the

Enlightenment narrative and notions of European moral superiority that justify the
use of force. This is evident in the unproblematic way in which outside forces have
assumed a right of interference in the region spanning from the 18th century when imperial powers demarcated
the Durrand Line (which created a border between British India and Afghanistan with the goal of making Afghanistan an effective
buffer statefor British Imperial interests91) to the American intervention that began in the Cold War, followed by the Soviets in the
1980s and the Americans, Canadians and British today. In fact, The Wests practical engagement in Afghanistan reveals how it has
served to reporoduce this neo-colonial myth as well as the complexities and paradoxes which simultaneously de-stabilize that myth.
During the cold war, the Soviet and the Americans used Afghanistan as the battleground for power, choosing to sponsor and
condemn various regimes as they saw fit; this history of foreign engagement contributed to state fragmentation, underdevelopment,
and the self-sustaining war-economy that persist today. An example of this is the use of rentier incomes during the early 1900s that
were used as a means of control and coercion.92

A2 Checks on War/Rules
More effective surveillance programs fail information is
passed onto other countries where suspects are identified for
conviction with little regard for misidentification
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 94//ejh)
The capture in February 1999 of the Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan
exposed the nature of American involvement with Turkey, in this case via a CIA
gambit that holds promise as a rich source of future blowback. The CIA term for this
policy is disruption, by which it means the harassment of terrorists around the
world. The point is to flush them out of hiding so that cooperative police forces or
secret services can then arrest and imprison them. According to John Diamond of
the Associated Press, The CIA keeps its role secret, and the foreign countries that
actually crack down on the suspects carefully hide the U.S. role, lest they stir up
trouble for themselves. There are no safeguards at all against misidentifying
suspects, and the CIA sends no formal notice to Congress. Disruption is said to
be a preemptive, offensive form of counterterrorism. Richard Clarke, President
Clintons antiterrorism czar, likes it because he can avoid the cumbersome
Congressional reporting requirements that go with CIA-directed covert operations
and because human rights organizations would have no way of identifying a CIA
role. The CIA has carried out disruption operations in at least ten countries since
September 1998. In the case of Ocalans capture, the United States provided
Turkey with critical information about Ocalans whereabouts. This was the first time
some of the details of a disruption campaign were made public.

A2 Deterrence
Deterrence is a worthless and outdated way to attain power
Etzioni 8 <Amitai Etzioni 08 is Professor of International Relations at The George
Washington University. For additional discussion, see part VI of Security First (Yale,
2007) or contact: comnet@gwu.edu Military Review September-October 2008
http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/etzioni/documents/StrategicReview.pdf>
An important underlying theme of the report is that the days of the United States as
the leading global power are numbered. While the United States held a virtual
monopoly on power at the end of World War II and then in a bi-polar world, in recent
years it has faced a world marked by what the report refers to as a diffusion of
power, and what others have referred to as a multi-polar or even a nonpolar
world. The United States, the report argues, must now function in a world also
marked by high and increasing levels of interconnectedness, where no one is
entitled to leadership; it must be earned. To put it differently, because power is
sectoral, the decline of American supremacy is uneven but fairly comprehensive. In
some areas, and in nuclear capabilities in particular, U.S. capabilities remain
unmatched. Yet for most exercises of power, nuclear weapons are not useful.
Similarly, U.S. conventional forces remain the best and strongest in the world, but
their relative strength is not as obvious as it was at the end of World War II,
especially in dealing with so-called non-state actors. U.S. economic and ideological
power is much diminished. Moreover, there is no reason to expect these trends to
reverse. On the contrary, as Chinas and, arguably, the EUs economic power
increases, as still other nations accrue more economic and military power, and as
non-state actors continue to threaten and wage asymmetrical warfare, the diffusion
of power in several sectors is likely to further unfold.

A2 Imperialism = Dead
U.S. imperial violence persists despite government rhetoric
support of genocidal policies against Kurds was confirmed in
Turkey to maintain a securitized outpost against Russia on the
same day that Clinton swore off intervention in Guatemala
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 91//ejh)
Visiting Guatemala in March 1999, soon after the reports release, President Clinton
said, It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and
intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong,
and the United States must not repeat that mistake. . . . The United States will no
longer take part in campaigns of repression.10 But on virtually the day that the
president was swearing off dirty tricks in other peoples countries, his government
was reasserting its support for Turkey in its war of repression against its Kurdish
minority.
The Kurds constitute fifteen million people in a Turkish population estimated at fiftyeight million. Another five million Kurds live largely within reach of Turkeys borders
in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The Turks have discriminated against the Kurds for the past
seventy years and have conducted an intense genocidal campaign against them
since 1992, in the process destroying some three thousand Kurdish villages and
hamlets in the backward southeastern part of the country. Former American
ambassador to Croatia Peter W. Galbraith comments that Turkey routinely jails
Kurdish politicians for activities that would be protected speech in democratic
countries.11 The Europeans have so far barred Turkey from the European Union
because of its treatment of the Kurds. Because of its strategic location on the border
of the former Soviet Union, however, Turkey was a valued American ally and NATO
member during the Cold War, and the United States maintains the relationship
unchanged even though the USSR has disappeared.

A2 No Interventions
U.S. interventions are often devastating for countries
economic and military policies that cause disasters overseas
are lauded domestically for Americanizing other countries
Johnson, Professor and CIA consultant, 04
(Chalmers, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire", Edition 2,
p. 71//ejh)
For any empire, including an unacknowledged one, there is a kind of balance sheet
that builds up over time. Military crimes, accidents, and atrocities make up only one
category on the debit side of the balance sheet that the United States has been
accumulating, especially since the Cold War ended. To take an example of quite a
different kind of debit, consider South Korea, a longtime ally. On Christmas Eve
1997, it declared itself financially bankrupt and put its economy under the guidance
of the International Monetary Fund, which is basically an institutional surrogate of
the United States government. Most Americans were surprised by the economic
disasters that overtook Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia in 1997 and
that then spread around the world, crippling the Russian and Brazilian economies.
They could hardly imagine that the U.S. government might have had a hand in
causing them, even though various American pundits and economists expressed
open delight in these disasters, which threw millions of people, who had previously
had hopes of achieving economic prosperity and security, into the most abysmal
poverty. At worst, Americans took the economic meltdown of places like Indonesia
and Brazil to mean that beneficial American-supported policies of globalization
were workingthat we were effectively helping restructure various economies
around the world so that they would look and work more like ours.
Above all, the economic crisis of 1997 was taken as evidence that our main
doctrinal competitorsthe high-growth capitalist economies of East Asiawere
hardly either as competitive or as successful as they imagined. In a New Years
commentary, the columnist Charles Krauthammer mused, Our success is the
success of the American capitalist model, which lies closer to the free market vision
of Adam Smith than any other. Much closer, certainly, than Asias paternalistic crony
capitalism that so seduced critics of the American system during Asias now-burst
bubble.3

A2 Transition
US Heg causes the problems it attempts to prevent; including
war and cyclic violence
Doran 9 (Charles F. Doran, Professor International Relations and director for
Canadian Studies. Statecraft Today: Regional Predicaments, Global Conundrums
included in Imbalance of Power: US Hegemony and International Order. 2009 by
Lynne Rienner Publishers. Pg. 95-96)

every effort at hegemony has started as military intervention to

right wrongs and to establish new order. Initially, for instance, Napoleon was
greeted in the German provinces, as a liberator Beethoven would dedicate the
Eroica symphony to Napoleon the hero and liberator. But very soon the isolated
interventions became a military campaign. A balance of power rose up
against the liberator who in the eyes of opponents had become an
occupier. By that time, Beethoven had torn up his dedication.
Historically,

Every effort at hegemony has also met ruinous failure, failure, that is, for
the world be hegemon, and indeed horrible desolation for the other
members of the system who became locked in a war to oppose hegemony.
On no fewer than six occasions catastrophic systems transformation has
the world been convulsed in the largest and most extensive of wars. During
each of these intervals of history, these wars followed simultaneous passage
through points of nonlinearity when everything changes in structural terms
in the power cycles of the number of preponderant states 17 The history of
the modern state system can descibe the outcome of these terrible
intervals as a success in that decentralized nation-state character of the
system has been maintained. Universal empire of the sort that was Rome
has been eluded. But the price in human and material terms attached to
victory has been prodigious on behalf of that decentalism and pluralism.
In reflecting upon the future of the world order, we must consider how a mature, long-term
equilibrium can emerge. First, according to Hans Morgenthau, one of the most common
mistakes in statecraft is, out of fear, to mistake a policy of the status quo for a policy of
imperialism. But if other governments mistake an effort by a state with the greatest power
in the system to be that of imperialism, this misconception will evoke a reaction.19 In

instances of imperialism of even perceived imperialism, the most likely

reaction is coalition formation and a triggering of the balance of power. The
balance of power can be consciously implemented. Otherwise, as in the fall
of 1939, in the face of overt aggression, the response will be automatic.
John Owen asks why the balance of power has not shifted against the
United States.

A2 Unipolarity
Unipolarity causes war
Schweller Xiaoyu Pu International Security, Volume 36, Number 1, Summer
2011, After Unipolarity: China's Visions of International Order in an Era of U.S.
Decline Randall L. pp. 41-72 (Article) Published by The MIT Press
https://myweb.rollins.edu/tlairson/china/chinavisionusdecline.pdf
History tells us that dramatic structural changes rarely unfold smoothly or
peacefully. Realists as far back as Thucydides have noted the danger of situations in
which states undergo rapid rises and declines in relative power, where one state
aspires to hegemonic status and another seeks to maintain it. Indeed, historys
most destructive and inuential armed conicts have been titanic struggles called
hegemonic wars: systemwide military contests of unlimited means between
coalitions led by a declining leader and a rising challenger. The fundamental issue at
stake in hegemonic wars is the maintenance or acquisition of prestige, dened as
the reputation for power that serves as the everyday currency of international
politics. Prestige decides who will order and govern the international system, the
nature of that order (its social purpose), and how that order will be provided
(whether by means of coercive or legitimate authority).8 The main causal driver of
Robert Gilpins theory of hegemonic war and international change is the law of
uneven rates of growth among states, which redistributes power in the international
system. Hegemonic wars concentrate power in the hands of one victorious state, in
whose interests a new international order is established. For a time, roughly twentyve years, there is little disjuncture between actual power and prestige, and so the
international order remains stable and legitimate. Over time, however, the law of
uneven growth diffuses power throughout the system. As the hegemons
competitors grow more powerful, their dissatisfaction with the status quo,
ambitions, and demands for prestige and inuence grow as well. Prestige, however,
tends to be sticky: reputations for power, divisions of territory, and the institutional
architecture of the international order do not move in lockstep with changes in
power. When a large enough disjuncture arises, the system enters a state of
disequilibrium.9 Eventually, serious international crises ensue, as spectacular
growth in the economic and military capabilities of rising powers triggers intense
competition among countries for resources and markets, military power, political
inuence, and prestige.10 Dramatic shifts in power also engender security
dilemmas. Whatever their true intentions, rapidly growing states often appear as
threats to their neighbors, as well as to the hegemon and its allies.11

2AC vs General Ks of Islam

2ac Islamophobic**
There is no justification for anti-Muslim sentiment: their
seemingly rational disagreement is a smokescreen for racism
that has resulted in immense violence
Chu 15 (Arthur, March 12, 2015, Targeted for Looking Muslim: The
Dawkins/Harris Worldview and a Twisted New Hypocrisy which feeds racism, Salon,
note: this author is also a notable Jeopardy candidate
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/12/targeted_for_looking_muslim_the_dawkinsharris_
worldview_and_a_twisted_new_hypocrisy_which_feeds_racism/ //EJH_)
But the sheer hypocrisy of saying that anti-Muslim prejudice is a consequence of
rational disagreement with the tenets of Islam rather than xenophobic distrust of
people who look different from normal Americans becomes most obvious when
you see how much of it falls on Sikhs.
The conflation of Sikhs and Muslim jihadis in the mind of the Western Islamophobe
shows how shallow said Islamophobia isSikhs do not originate from anywhere in
the Middle East but from the Punjab region of India. Sikhism does not share Islams
Abrahamic lineage and has no direct connection to Islam, unlike Christianity or
Judaismthe boundary between East and West Punjab that became part of the IndiaPakistan border was, in fact, drawn to separate the Punjab regions Muslim
population from its Hindu and Sikh population.
If anything, Sikhs are historically one of the more pro-Western ethnic groups in
South Asiathe Sikh Regiment was the backbone of the British Indian Army and
was heavily decorated for its contribution to the Allied victories in World Wars I and
II. The connection between the Sikh community and the Islamic terrorism of AlQaeda and ISIS is nil.
So why are Sikhs mistaken for terrorists so often? For the shallowest reason
imaginablethe turban, one of the most common forms of headgear in the world, is
associated in our minds with the Middle East, and Sikh men are required to wear a
turban at all timesalong with having uncut hair and beardsas a sign of devotion.
Ironically, while turbans are commonplace wear in many predominantly Muslim
countries and traditionally Muslims are enjoined to have their heads covered as a
sign of respect when praying, there is no similar requirement to wear a turban in
Islam. And the keffiyeh, the headgear most common in the Arabian Peninsula,
where the 9/11 hijackers came from, doesnt look much like a stereotypical turban
at all.
But bigots dont care much about such fine distinctions. Hence one of the first
revenge murders after 9/11 was of a Sikh man , Balbir Singh Sodhi, in Arizona.
Hence the bloodiest act of revenge domestic terrorism in the U.S. was the Oak
Creek shooting in 2012. Hence Sikh men being punished for the crime of walking
around being visibly different by being run over by trucks and beaten by mobs of
teenagers as recently as last year.

Criticisms of radical Islam promote racism and spur bigotry

the fight against terrorism has fostered racist hatred
disconnected from geopolitics or religion
Chu 15 (Arthur, March 12, 2015, Targeted for Looking Muslim: The
Dawkins/Harris Worldview and a Twisted New Hypocrisy which feeds racism, Salon,
note: this author is also a notable Jeopardy candidate
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/12/targeted_for_looking_muslim_the_dawkinsharris_
worldview_and_a_twisted_new_hypocrisy_which_feeds_racism/ //EJH_)
Im not pointing out the way Islamophobia spills over onto Sikhs as though to imply
that actual Muslims are somehow an acceptable target. Theyre not. But its still
instructive to see how easily this vitriol spills over onto Sikhs simply because they
have dark skin and wear turbansor onto Christians because they have dark skin
and the name Hussein.
Its worth pointing out that racism is not just vicious and irrational but that its
mindless and sloppy. The targeting of Sikhs shatters the lie that Islamophobia is
about rational criticism of the religious tenets of Islam or a rational response to
geopolitical realities, just as the racial violence directed against Japanese-Americans
in World War II frequently spilled over onto Chinese- and Korean-Americans, even
though China and Korea were ostensibly countries the U.S. was magnanimously
fighting to save from Japanese imperialism.
Weve had 14 years since 9/11 to learn even minimal, basic facts like the difference
between Muslims and Sikhs. Nothings changed. Bigots dont care, and theyre often
proud of not caring. Racism is deeply woven into our culture, and it quite literally
does not matter what the intellectual justification for a given prejudice isset it loose
in the wild and it will become another manifestation of racism, lashing out wildly
and viciously at anyone who looks different and wrong to white peoples eyes.
So fine, criticize radical Islam if you will; develop strategies to fight terrorism if
you feel its necessary to save lives. But if you refuse to acknowledge the dangerous
strain of racism you may be feeding by doing soif you erase the people totally
unrelated to whatever you think the fight is about that your fight is going to hurt , as
Dawkins, Harris and the staff of Charlie Hebdo all didthen at best youre a fool. At
worst youre a racist looking for a new way to get away with racism.

2ac Perm
Blaming Islam for oppression is ineffective- a combination of
reinterpretation of the Quran along with rejecting
Islamophobia is critical to solving
Hasan 12 (Md. Mahmudul Hasan is Assistant Professor at the Department of
English Language and Literature, Kulliyyah of Islamic Revealed Knowledge and
Human Sciences, International Islamic University Malaysia)(Feminism as
Islamophobia: A review of misogyny charges against Islam, IIUM Press, Intellectual
Discourse, Vol 20, No 1, 2012, pgs 71-73)//ASMITH
Going against Islam or blaming culture for womens oppression and then seeking
solutions in a secular, foreign ideology takes Muslim societies nowhere. It would be
far better received and more effective if Muslim men were reminded of the
teachings of Islam that obligate them to be just and compassionate to women. As
such, feminist scholars in Muslim societies should insist on a feminism that is
indigenous (Bullock, 2002, p. xxii) and interpret or reinterpret the Qurn and
Prophetic traditions through the prism of gender justice. As an American Muslim
woman said to Fernea (1998, p. 378), The basis of egalitarianism is there in the
Qurn. What different cultures have done with it is another matter (378). Feminist
intellectuals in Muslim societies need to distinguish between Islam as a revealed
message and Islam as culturally enacted practices. They should further bear in mind
that justice is the primordial principle of the Islamic belief system. An unequivocal
emphasis on justice is the crux of the message of Qurn and Prophetic Sunnah and
very much includes gender egalitarianism. Secular feminists and Islamic feminists in
Muslim societies may disagree on certain issues. However, if they can agree on
promoting justice and preventing an oppressive attitude in the broader sense,
then, the gates are opened to a wide range of areas where they may cooperate and
work together; including but not limited to education, spousal abuse, humane
treatment for women and so on (Bullock, 2002, p. xxviii). They may also unite
against the capitalist maneuvering of the female body, as a shared campaign to
stop the use of womens bodies for selling commodities, the competition amongst
women to be beautiful to attract mens attention which would appeal to secular
leftists, feminists, and religious scholars alike (Bullock, 2002, p. 90). As a woman in
Turkey declared to Fernea (1998, p. 217): What secular and religious women need
to do is stand together. Well all be stronger for learning about each other. But
cutting each other down weakens us all. Denigrating Islamic principles (and that,
without proper study and understanding) is not only unwise and disrespectful to
Islam and Muslims, but also fruitless and disruptive. It causes unnecessary troubles
in society and gives a bad name to the noble efforts of numerous scholars and
activists who struggle for gender justice. Consider the killings of two teenage boys
during the height of the anti-Taslima Nasrin campaign in Bangladesh in 1994 and of
two more people in the Indian state of Karnataka in early March 2010 (Hasan,
2010, p. 549). All these were brought about as a result of Taslima Nasrins
irresponsible statements, attacking Islam and Muslims religious sentiments, all
presumably in the service of feminism. Unfortunately, with regards to the question

of womens rights, Islamists and secularists in Muslim societies have become so

hostile to one anothers views that a dialogue between them seems rather
impossible. Womens rights activists of both secular and Islamic orientations had a
chance to discuss gender issues at the Beijing Global Womens Conference in 1995.
Sadly, their sharp disagreements and debates turned their discussion groups into,
to use Waduds (2002) capturing words, screaming sessions. The fact of the
matter, however, remains that if feminists are passionate about promoting womens
rights (and not merely importing foreign ideas in the name of feminism), and if
Islamists believe in the primordial, historical Islamic principle of justice, then there
should be innumerable avenues for both groups to work together in synergy, as
mentioned before. Such sanity, however, seems very farfetched in most Muslim
countries. The reason for this is perhaps that both Islamic and secular forces believe
that Islam is essentially anti-feminist. Hence, regarding womens rights, secularists
keep themselves distanced from Islam and the Muslims from feminism. A hope for
reconciliation between the two camps may, nonetheless, not be logically impossible
or simply wishful thinking if the two parties can communicate and understand each
other. While Islamists need to appreciate the legitimate feminist concerns and
should not dismiss feminism simply because it originates in the West, secular
feminists should review some of their ideas for compatibility checks against cultural
specificities and should appreciate and highlight aspects of gender egalitarianism in
Islam. Rigidity in feminist work is not very helpful because feminisms worst
enemies have been those who have treated feminism like a new religion with
dogmas that can allow for only one possible interpretation (Marks, et al., 1990, p.
73). There is also a need to differentiate between different branches and phases of
Western feminism. Until the 1960s, the feminist movement in the West was largely
fighting for womens legitimate, fundamental human rights, and there is not much
contradiction between Islam and those feminist concerns. However, Islam is
opposed to some second wave Western feminist ideas, such as, the right to sexual
self-determination and the so-called sexual liberation of the 1960s which Muslims
may regard as, the false emancipation of Western women, exploited and
sexualized in Western consumer society (Lewis & Mills, 2003, p. 18). For many
centuries in the West, women did not have the very basic human rights which
Muslim women had been enjoying since the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) established
Islam in Arabia. Equal education, employment, political representation, ownership of
property, the right to divorce, and many other rights were alien to Western women
until the twentieth century. So a strong feminist movement was badly needed there.
Owing largely to cultural specificities, the feminist movement did not see an equal
momentum in the Muslim world, as gender relations were different there. In
actuality, with Muslims a true revolution occurred in the seventh century. As Wadud
(2002) puts it: Islam brought radical changes regarding women and society, despite
the deeply entrenched patriarchy of seventh-century Arabia. The Qurn provides
women with explicit rights to inheritance, independent property, divorce and the
right to testify in a court of law. It prohibits wanton violence towards women and
girls and is against duress in marriage and community affairs. Women and men
equally are required to fulfill all religious duties, and are equally eligible for
punishment for misdemeanors. Such a glorious account of womens empowerment
and gender equity in Islam should not lead Muslims to be complacent, or to believe

that Muslim societies are free from gender prejudices and discriminations, or to
avoid undertaking important reforms. A few generations after the Prophet (SAW)
passed away, Islamic teachings began to be interpreted with an increasingly antiwoman bias. Moreover, with the spectacular spread of Islam to other cultures, such
as the Persians, Byzantines and Greeks, Muslims began to borrow and follow some
misogynistic practices from those societies. This caused many foreign cultural
practices to become embedded in the social matrices of many Muslim countries,
and thus in the mindsets and behaviour of people. Islamic scholars should address
such issues without further delay.

1ar Islamophobic
Their academic criticism of Islam is just a cover for mass
Western violence it displaces other forms of violence and
sanitizes the worst forms of racism and repression
Jackson, 7R. (2007), Constructing Enemies: Islamic Terrorism in Political and Academic
Discourse. Government and Opposition, 42: 394426. doi: 10.1111/j.1477-7053.2007.00229.x ya boy
Riley 2 fly

the deployment of a series of core labels,

terms and discursive formations, including, among others: the
Islamic world, the West, the Islamic revival, political Islam, Islamism,
The discourse is first and foremost founded on

extremism, radicalism, fundamentalism, religious terrorism, jihadists,

Wahhabis, Salafis, militants, moderates, global jihadist movement, al-Qaeda, and of course,
Islamic terrorism. Crucially, in their textual usage these terms are often
vaguely defined (if at all), yet culturally loaded and highly flexible in the
way they are deployed. In addition, these labels and terms are organized
into a series of dramatic oppositional binaries, such as the West
versus the Islamic world, extremists versus moderates, violent
versus peaceful, democratic versus totalitarian, religious versus secular, medieval versus modern and
savage versus civilized. Such powerful categories function to
construct Islamic terrorists and extremists as particular kinds of
subjects within the overall discourse and enforce highly constricting
subject positions upon them vis--vis other subjects, such as decent people, democratic states or
moderate Muslims, for example. Importantly, they also render unreasonable more nuanced narratives about the oftencontradictory identities and characteristics of the narratives' central actors.

The application of labels

such as terrorist, fundamentalist and extremist to groups like Hamas and Hizbollah for example,
functions to obscure their simultaneous existence as political party,
social welfare provider, protection force, local association, relief
agency, charity, education provider, bank, guerrilla force and the
like as well as position them as the enemy of Western societies. The
discourse also includes a series of careful qualifications that are designed to mitigate the use of labels, narratives and assumptions

it is not uncommon for

Islamic terrorism texts to begin with statements such as: Most
Muslims prefer a peaceful and inclusive version of their faith; Islamic
terrorists are inspired by a distortedvision of Islam and sanctify their
campaign of violence through a selective reading of Quranic
that in other political or cultural contexts would be considered pejorative. Thus,

21

phrases; and We do not act against Islam. The true followers of Islam are our brothers and sisters in this struggle. Of
course, in extreme expressions of the discourse, such qualifications are
replaced by overt hostility towards Islam or aspects of it. However, in the majority of Islamic
terrorism texts, these kinds of statements are ubiquitous, but notably fail to avoid
subsequent expressions of prejudicial material. Discourses produce meaning in part
22

23

through drawing upon the linguistic resources and specific discursive opportunity structures or the extant cultural raw materials
of a particular social context: texts always refer back to other texts which themselves refer still to other texts, in other words. 8 A
genealogical approach to discourse therefore can help us understand how current forms of knowledge have been naturalized
through time and discursive practice. This is not the place to outline a detailed genealogy of the contemporary Islamic terrorism
discourse, but simply to suggest that three discernible discursive traditions would seem important for understanding its present

Islamic terrorism is rooted in the

assumptions, theories and knowledge of terrorism studies a
discrete field of academic research that has grown tremendously and
gained genuine authority since the 11 September terrorist attacks. The notion of Islamic terrorism appears
to have emerged from studies of religious terrorism, a subject founded largely on
form. First and foremost, the current discourse of

David Rapoport's seminal article from 1984.9 Since then, a number of core texts and scholars have established reputations as
leading sources of expert knowledge in Islamic terrorism. 10 As later sections of this article demonstrate, a great many of the central
labels and narratives of the Islamic terrorism discourse are drawn from this body of work. Importantly, through well-established

linking terrorism experts with the policy-making

establishment many of these narratives have become politically
influential. Secondly, the discourse derives a great many of its core assumptions, labels and narratives from the long
networks of influence

11

tradition and archive of orientalist scholarship on the Middle East and Arab culture and religion. 12 This literature expanded rapidly in
response to the tumultuous events in the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s such as the 1972 Munich massacre, the 1973 oil
shocks, the 1979 Iranian revolution and embassy hostage crisis, the Rushdie affair and the terrorist kidnappings and hijackings of
the 1980s. It has been greatly stimulated once again by the 9/11 attacks and subsequent war on terrorism. Importantly, Samuel
Huntington's highly influential 1993 essay The Clash of Civilizations?, the title of which is derived from a much-cited article by
Bernard Lewis,13 reproduced a number of orientalist claims for an international affairs audience and it is therefore an important
antecedent of the current Islamic terrorism discourse. 14 As with terrorism studies scholars, a great many identifiable orientalist
Middle East scholars, including Bernard Lewis, Noah Feldman and the late Raphael Patai, have made frequent appearances as
advisers and expert witnesses for official bodies, thereby transmitting many of the central assumptions and narratives of orientalist

the discourse draws on a long tradition of

cultural stereotypes and deeply hostile media representations and
depictions of Islam and Muslims. Typically, in portraying Muslims,
the mainstream media has tended to employ frameworks centred on
violence, threat, extremism, fanaticism and terrorism, although
there is also a visual orientalist tradition in which they are
scholarship into the policy process.15 Thirdly,

16

portrayed as exotic and mysterious. Moreover, these kinds of

cultural representations have proved extremely resilient, perhaps
because, as Said claims, they reflect deeper social-cultural fears,
anxieties and stereotypes of the oriental other that go back to the
imperial age. For others, they are the necessary cultural corollary of contemporary forms of imperialism. In addition to
these three primary historical discursive traditions, the post-9/11 Islamic terrorism
discourse frequently draws upon and is embedded within a wider
set of political-cultural narratives surrounding the war on terrorism ,
17

18

19

including, among others: the good war narrative surrounding the struggle against fascism during the Second World War;
mythologies of the Cold War, including the notion of the long war, the deeply embedded civilization-versus-barbarism narrative, the
cult of innocence, the language and assumptions of the enemy within, the labels and narratives of rogue states, and the discourse
surrounding the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. 20

Dehumanized criticisms of Islam perpetuate mass state

violence
Ghorashi 03<Halleh Ghorashi: Ayaan Hirsi Ali: daring or dogmatic? Debates on
multiculturalism and emancipation in the Netherlands. In: Toon van Meijl, Henk
Driessen (Hrsg.): Multiple identifications and the self. Stichting Focaal, Utrecht 2003,
S. 163 172>
http://www.kanak-attak.de/ka/down/pdf/amr/Halleh_Gorashi_Forum_Focaal_Final.pdf
Beneath this rightist discourse in the Netherlands lie particular definitions of nation
and culture. What the three above-mentioned figures in the Netherlands share is
their emphasis on the incompatibility of cultures and on the need to protect Dutch
culture and identity from cultural invasion and to promote Dutch cultural norms and
values. This newly formed exclusionary rhetoric is based on a homogeneous, static,
coherent, and rooted notion of culture which Stolcke calls cultural fundamentalism
(1995: 4). Now it is not the race that needs to be protected but a historically rooted,
homogenous national culture: racism without race (idem). This new kind of
exclusion in the name of culture goes beyond the borders of the Netherlands: it has
become the common discourse of the Europe and the West in general. It, however,
not only legitimizes an attack on the rights of the Islamic immigrants inside its
borders, but also justifies military actions outside its borders in the name of
democracy and humanism, what Chomsky (1999) calls: military humanism. In the
Netherlands this liberal enlightenment fundamentalism developed in a particular
way as it adapted to the welfare state by blaming immigrants for their dependence
on the state that developed due to high unemployment rates. The recent discursive
assumption has been that the social and economic problems of immigrants will be
solved once they distance from their culture and assimilate into Dutch society. This
assumption that explains the immigrants problems through culture is not only nave
it is also very specific form of cultural fundamentalism, which is not just about

protecting Dutch culture but it is also about converting others to it. This new kind of
exclusion in the name of culture not only deepens the us and them dichotomies
within the society but also weakens the very foundations of the nation - as I argue
below.

2AC vs Fem K of Islam

2ac Islamophobic**
Their kritik is exactly what the 1AC revolts against-- this notion
that all Muslim Americans hold certain beliefs that make them
victims of hatred and fear
Their portrayals of Islamic men as patriarchal reproduces
Islamophobia literature written by Muslim-American women
should be held suspect due to the way media influences and
shapes the literature to justify the war on terror
Jelodar, Yusof and Hashim 14 (Esmaeil Zeiny Jelodar, Center for Occidental
Studies, Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS), The National
University of Malaysia. Noraini Md. Yusof & Ruzy Suliza Hashim, School of Language
Studies and Linguistics, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, The National
University of Malaysia)(Muslim Womens Memoirs: Disclosing Violence or
Reproducing Islamophobia?, June 24, 2014, Canadian Center of Science and
Education, Asian Social Science; Vol. 10, No. 14)//ASMITH
Immediately after the tragic event of 9/11, the American media became fraught
with different kinds of discourses portraying atrocities and hardships of the Middle
Easterners in Islamic societies. As one of these media venues, the American literary
markets witnessed a mass production of works engendered by Muslim women.
Many of these works are memoirs and revolve around women, Islam, a patriarchal
society, and the state's oppression. These authors recount painful and tortured
experiences of their daily lives in the Middle East under the Islamic regimes. The
authors of these memoirs provide insights into people of their country who have
always been stereotyped. However, unfortunately, in some memoirs, these
depictions are rarely truthful and realistic; they are, oftentimes, replete with
stereotypes and generalizations. This unprecedented rise of memoir is a response to
the western readers' curiosity about the Middle East. The rise of this genre could
also be partly attributed to its promise to take the western readers into a journey of
the writer's private life of unheard and unseen events which is of a great interest for
western readers to explore. The western readers approach these Middle Eastern
memoirs with certain sorts of expectations and desires: exoticism and gender
oppression by the Islamic regimes; their expectancy is always fulfilled in the Muslim
memoirs. Disclosing gender oppression and exoticism of Islam in memoirs by and
about Muslim women hinges on stereotypical depictions which have dominated
Western discourses in representing the Middle East since the 18th century. These
clichs fall into 'coming-of-age memoirs,' 'honor-killing memoirs,' 'victim memoirs'
and 'escapee memoirs.' The victim in all these memoirs is always the marginalized
woman who is oppressed by the state's Islamic laws, beaten up by a male family
member and killed to save face or breaks through a life of oppression and absconds
from her country of origin to a secular heaven, the West. Islam in these texts is
represented as a misogynist religion; hence, they create Islamophobia, an
abhorrence of Islam and Muslims. There were few memoirs before 9/11

confronting the same issues but it is not much of a surprise that the post
9/11Muslim memoirs receive greater attention than their predecessors. Adam
(2008) argues that 'infidel' (2007), the post 9/11 best-selling memoir of the proAmerican, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, captivated more readers and news coverage than the
American-ambivalent, pre-9/11 Egyptian author, Nawal El Saadawi, who has been
dealing with the identical matters of child marriage, lapidation and women's right in
her memoirs. Both authors reveal the violence against women in their country but
the former receives much publicity in the West. Writing a memoir is an effort by
Muslim women to reclaim their identities as never in the past were they allowed
publicizing their private lives. The social laws of patriarchal societies of the Middle
East suggest that women must not reveal private aspects of their lives as private
aspects should be kept within the domestic realm. It is praiseworthy that they defy
patriarchy by the act of their writing and breaking the gender code. Conway (1998,
p. 87) maintains that these memoirs should be read "as conscious acts of rebellion.
Writing and publishing one's life history was moving beyond secret rebellion to
announce one's reasons for breaking the gender code." Breaking the gender code is
suggestive of the pleasant fact that men are no longer the monopolized owner of
the memoir as a genre since women gained access to the restrictive territory.
Muslim women's memoirs are not only to narrate the significant events of the
authors' lives but they are also supposed to be an agent of change in the quality of
the lives of people, especially women. Sadly, however, some of these Muslim
women memoirs are manipulated to meet political demands of the West. The
authors of these memoirs, who promise to dismantle the outdated orientalism,
reiterate the stereotypes of women suffering behind the veil imposed by the
oppressive Islamic regime. Their life stories are an amalgamation of twisted truths
and fabricated events; at times, a memoir could be wholly concocted for political
purposes of the West like the 'honor-killing' memoir of Norma Khouri's Forbidden
Love (2003). In 2004, Malcolm Knox, the Sydney Morning Herald reporter, unveiled
Norma Khouri's bestseller Forbidden Love as a fraud. In less than two years, the life
narrative was sold in great numbers: more than two hundred thousand copies in
Australia, with forty thousand copies printed in the UK and fifty thousand copies
printed in the United Sates (Pazargadi, 2010). Norma Khouri's fictional testimony is
the hoax we had to have as the conditions and situations in her book are just right
for a life narrative by and about Muslim and Arab woman to be 'ousted' by a fake
"trader with tainted goods" (Whitlock, 2007, p. 106). Two texts and a writer with two
very different identities committed this roguish act; however, there is only one
single story to tell. In the United States, it is published as Honor Lost: Love and
Death in Modern-Day Jordan (2003). The creamy white cover of the book can be
seen as an access into forbidden spheres: veiled Muslim women, ancient debris in
the background, and Arabic decorative stencil are all trademarks of associations
amongst ethnicity, gender, and tradition that lead to the "veiled best-seller"
(Whitlock, 2007, p. 106). Elsewhere, the same story appears with a different title:
Forbidden Love is published in 2003. This book's cover had a black and glided color;
however, it was jacketed with the same trademarks: veiled Muslim woman and
Arabic ancient tradition. Random House, the publication group, ordered its removal
when it was found to be a fraud and eventually rejected Norma Khouri as a reliable
autobiographer (Whitlock, 2007, pp. 106-107). In both of Norma's stories Honor Lost

and Forbidden Love (2003), the very same story of punishment or terrible
retribution is told. It focuses on honor killing; this is a "practice of retribution carried
out by male family members when women bring dishonor to her family because of
sexual indiscretions" (Whitlock, 2007, p. 107). Dalia and the narrator of the life
narrative are close friends; both were born in 1970 and raised in Jabel Hussein
district of Amman. Dalia is from a strict Muslim family and Norma is Catholic. They
are running a unisex beauty parlor, opened in May 1990, which offers unique
services in Amman: a salon catering for men and women. In March 1995, the girls'
lives changed when a broad-shouldered handsome officer named Michael comes
into the salon. Michael is an emotional, loving, and devoted man just unlike any
Arab man that the girls have ever known or imagined. The doomed lovers, Dalia and
Michael, and Norma jeopardize their lives on a perilous adventure "for simply a
romance" (2003, p. 57). When Dalia's family discovered the affair, Dalia is stabbed
in her own home by her brothers and father (Whitlock, 2007). Losing Dalia in this
way made vivid to me something I'd always known but had managed to ignore. I
could no longer hide my true emotions and beliefs in the hope my silent cries would
be heard. In memory of Dalia, I vowed to transform my silence into audible screams
for justice and equal rights (Norma, 2003, p. 145). Once Dalia was killed, Khouri
claimed that she escaped from Jordan to Athens where she wrote the book and
immigrated to Australia from there. Life narrative is assumed to be trustworthy and
readers take the events in these life narratives as true and real incidents; unaware
of the fact that these writers can easily distort realities into fiction. It is the same
case for Norma before disclosure of the lies in her story. Norma Khouri keeps
mentioning the indecent incidents that happened to her close friend and she saw
with her own eyes in Jordan, but in fact, as Knox reveals, she leftJordan when she
was three. All that hair salon and romantic affair was nothing but a figment of her
imagination. This author is an opportunistic writer who invented terrors and
reproduced Islamophobia through her 'honor-killing' memoir. Different critics
revealed her lies one by one; and finally by August 2004 the different identities of
the writer were laid bare. Rana Husseini, the Jordanian journalist and women's right
activist, and Amal Al-Sabbagh, the director of the women's commission in Amman,
have proven that Norma's story was untrue on multiple levels. They have found 73
errors related to the geography, location, culture and the discussed Islamic
practices in the memoir (Pazargadi, 2010). Some critics believe that it is the timing
of Norma's book that is of great significance: between the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq
war, it was time for life narratives stressing the primitivism of Arab and Muslim
societies (Whitlock, 2007, p. 109). Whitlock quotes Bolt (2004) asserting that all life
narratives possess a scant distortion of truth, but Norma's "may be one of the many
that are one big lie (2007, p. 110). Bolt (2004) believes that Norma had a usual
strategy to achieve fame in a world longing for trendy sufferer and puts forward a
statement that is worth considering: Trade as a woman, if possible who is from some
tribe or oppressed minority, and has survived the cruelty of whites/colonialists/rightwing thugs/rich guys. And if you aren't any of the above, then fake it. A scandal is a
definitive event; it brings to light the social, political, and ethical investments of
narrators, readers, and publishers in life narrative. A hoax brings autobiography out
of the shadows and into the editorials, columns and opinion pieces of the Sunday
tabloid. "Write a book that tells of your woe, or trades on it. Garnish it with New Age

mysticism and ShowTime! Teary readers! Big sales! Just perfect for readers looking
for the latest victims to weep over" (2007, p. 110). Discussions about Norma's affair
in the media raise the following questions: why can't publishers supervise the
perimeters of life narratives to keep a credible product? "What are the rights of
readers and responsibilities of publishers?" (Whitlock, 2007, p. 111). Whitlock (2007,
p. 112) continues to argue the fact that autobiographies come into the West from
the East - and distribute to form grassroots' opinion, consolidate clichs, and
presents plot "custom-made for our times" shows their potentiality as propaganda.
Arguments on legitimacy and authenticity are always of vital importance in the
trajectory of minority life narratives and testimony should be always subjected to
cross-examination. By recognizing the hoax or rogue as the 'dark side' of life
narratives, Whitlock means to suggest that accusations of chic dissimulation and
the questioning of legitimacy and trustworthiness always exist when a testimonial
narrative is able to draw forth empathy and cognizance of human right issues
(Whitlock, 2007, p. 112). Other critics such as Hamid Dabashi (2011) condemns
these writings as providing justification for imperialism's 'war on terror' and
reinforcing the hegemonic imperialism. Therefore, these memoirs can be
'softweapons' in reproducing the Islamophobia as the narrators employ
strategies to elicit sympathy from the western readers; hence,
manufacturing the public's consent for the 'war on terror' project in Muslim
countries. This sentiment can be confirmed by Whitlock's idea on memoirs:
[Memoirs] can personalize and humanize categories of people whose experiences
are frequently unseen and unheard. To attend to a nauseated body at risk in
Baghdad, or to hear a militant feminist body beneath a burka, to attach a face and
recognize a refugee is to make powerful interventions in debates about social
justice, sovereignty, and human rights. Life narratives can do these things. But it is
a "soft" weapon because it is easily co-opted into propaganda. In modern
democratic societies propaganda is frequently not the violent and coercive
imposition of ideas but a careful manipulation of opinion and emotion in the public
sphere and a management of information in the engineering of consent. Life
narratives can be complicit in these processes (2007, p. 3). These memoirs flooded
bookstores in the West; stretched across a wall of bookstore can be found several
portrays of veiled Muslim women (Whitlock, 2007). This exotic exhibition of many
copies of Muslim life narratives, all published in 2002-3 onwards, is absolutely
haunting. Whitlock's question might be helpful here to mention: "How can a reader
resist interpellation as a liberal Western consumer who desires to liberate and
recognize" Muslim women "by lifting the burka and bringing" her "alongside us,
barefaced in the West?" (2007, p. 47). Pulling the Western eyes behind the chador
or under the burka is an effective rhetorical approach; it draws out both "sympathy
and advocacy" that can be put to quite "various political and strategic uses"
(Whitlock, 2007, p. 47). By portraying the unseen and unheard events of violence in
their memoirs, Dabashi is of the idea that these memoirists play a crucial role in
constructing a belief in the public that empires should be preserved and sustained
"than in truly informing the public about the cultures they denigrate and dismiss"
(2011, pp. 12-13). They fake authority when telling their white masters what they
desire to hear, not what they need to know, and they are rewarded by being labeled
"voices of dissent" by their white masters (Dabashi, 2011, p. 17). Dabashi (2011)

argues that these authors play a key role in making the inversion of truth by fantasy
appear rational. Their narratives became pervasive all over the Western market and
this market was looking for the best and the smartest individuals with "a pigment to
their complexion who could tell their tales with an accent to their English" (2011, p.
16). This was the time for the Muslim women authors to step forward to "oblige,
accommodate and entertain" as American military was preparing to attack the
Muslim world (2011, p.16). They promote the idea that imperialist's
intervention is justified to fight Islamic terrorism saving Muslim women
from their own men "white men saving brown women from brown men"
(Spivak, 1988, p. 297). Amongst these Muslim memoirs, Iranian women's memoirs
have become increasingly popular and are well-received. This recent flourishing of
memoirs by Iranian women occurred concurrently with the United States fixation on
Iran as part of the Bush administration's project of 'Axis of Evil' and the
interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq which took place under the justification of
humanitarian act of saving people, especially women residing under the oppressive
Islamic regime (Rastegar, 2006). This new wave of Iranian women memoirs includes
Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis: The Story
of a Childhood (2003), Persepolis: The Story of a Return (2004), and Embroideries
(2005), Roya Hakakian's Journey from the Land of No (2004), Azadeh Moaveni's
Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran
(2005) and Marina Nemat's Prisoner of Tehran (2007) just to name a few. Almost all
of these memoirs are the production of the author's imagination and reality. They
are usually generalized, one-sided and out of context stories denigrating Islam.
They depict the violence in the Islamic regime and the difficulties a woman goes
through her daily life in Iran. In these memoirs, Islam is portrayed as denigrating
women; thus, these texts can create good justification in maintaining imperialism
through Islamophobia. One of the most successful memoirs of the recent wave is
Satrapi's Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003). It is Satrapi's highly acclaimed
coming-of-age graphic memoir set in revolutionary Iran. Satrpi (2003) claims that
she has written the memoir to dispel the stereotypes of the Orient and dismantle
the outdated Orientalist myths.

A2 Patriarchal
Patriarchal interpretations are just man-made- the Quran
advocates for equality. Islam is not the cause of womens
suffering
Malik 10 (Waleed Malik, York University - Osgoode Hall Law School, Carleton
University, Islamic Feminism, Critique: A worldwide journal of politics, Fall
2010)//ASMITH
Another element of this larger effort, and a supremely important one, is the effort of
Muslim women and feminists to engage with the sources of Islamic law, especially
the Quran, using the opportunity to access their faith in a way that had been denied
to them for centuries. Part of this effort has been to expose the patriarchal biases
that had contaminated the work of the classical interpreters, which produced the
examples that were presented earlier. However, unlike many secular feminists, they
do not use this as a basis for condemning their faith as a tool of oppression, but
rather seek to find a framework for emancipation built upon it. The work of Amina
Wadud, a remarkable pioneer in this effort, exemplifies the spirit of this movement.
She argues that all the current mainstream approaches to the rights and status of
women fails the needs of Muslim women in some way. She rejects both the
traditional perspectives, arguing that under the guise of defending the pristine
honour of women it would restrict and suppress them and simply ignore the many
real difficulties and challenges they must face every day. However, she also
rejects the modern, secular approach, arguing that it is wrong to see
Islam as the cause of womens suffering and that the approach gives no
attention to Muslim womens spirituality and the importance of their
religious identity. Furthermore, she argues that both these approaches set up an
artificial distinction between what is modern and what is Islamic, creating a conflict
in which there can be only one, even though many may want and deserve both.44
Instead of choosing between either the traditional or modern paradigms, Wadud
instead turns to a third alternative she sees as developing within Islam, claiming
that it is a dynamic religion that is capable of changing to produce answers to
challenges being faced in individual lives. And though she accepts that Islam, as it is
currently understood and practiced, has been used to limit women, she insists that
while the Quran is divine revelations whatever proceeds from it, in the form of
interpretation, is manmade and so is subject to the faults and prejudices of
mankind. In this case she argues that it is the dominance of a male clergy who
silenced the voices of women in the process of interpretation that has led to the
faulty and problematic interpretation that exists today. And, unsurprisingly, her
solution is to argue that women (and men) must reengage with their faith to
end the practice of men telling women how they should be and act , and
instead develop an authentic and gender-neutral Muslim identity through alternative
Quranic ijtehad (i.e. exegesis). Though some have perceived her work as an attack
upon Islam, Wadud insists that she is operating from within the heart of the Islamic
faith and tradition, using the techniques of interpretation developed by the ulema
over the centuries to show how they fell short of their own standards because of

their prejudices.45 She argues that we must take away from the Quran the
influence of the misogynistic context that has grown around it, for instance by
recognizing the absolute absurdity of an interpretation that ignores the specific
injunctions within the Quran that outline how much daughters should be able to
inherit from their parents property, to argue that women must be denied all
inheritance. And, by separating this context, she argues we will find a truer
understanding of the faith which will realize that the trend in Islam was to break
with what had been in the past to emancipate women and cut away at the bounds
of misogyny that had existed before; as such, she argues that by engaging in this
process of interpretation we can find an agenda for womens rights and the tools for
legitimating them.46 For instance, she argues with the age old question of the
differences between men and women and whether that determines their status in
any way from an explicitly Islamic perspective. Wadud argues that while there may
be some differences between men and women, to the extent that only the latter can
give birth, and roles they play in society, she rejects any notion of hierarchy
between the two by referring to the many verses of the Quran which declares
men and women as equal. Working from the Quranic story of the creation, in
which the first man and woman are created from a single soul, she argues that men
and women are just sexually different versions of the same creation who are
guaranteed equal rights and status in Islam. And based on this she declares her
mission, one which she argues as being mandatory for all believers of Islam, to be
one of engaging with her faith to separate it from the misogynistic context in which
it developed in order to regain for women their full humanity and moral agency as
God-appointed vicegerent (khalifah).47 The vast majority of Islamic feminists,
whether they are aware of the work of Amina Wadud or not, are engaged in this
very project, though some may choose different subjects or strategies for doing so.
For instance Riffat Hussein, another scholar of Islam, chooses to focus on the
sayings of the Prophet, exposing those that have been falsified as a means of
legitimating the oppression of women. But all of them are engaged in a similar
project, one that is challenging traditional notions of who is able to interpret the
Islamic faith and develop its laws and injunctions, attempting to take away the
authority of Islam from those who would legitimate a patriarchal society and world
and instead turn it against that kind of a world, using spaces created for women
within the field of religious interpretation to examine questions of importance to
women from a more gender-neutral or aware perspective.48 There are many, many
instances of this project of many kinds, all contributing towards this larger project.
Some decide to focus on specific laws and actions justified in the name of Islam. For
instance Asifa Quraishi in one essay focuses on rape laws enacted in Pakistan
during a period of Islamization in the eighties and which were justified in the
name of religion even though they are known to be extremely harmful for women
and victims of rape, allowing many rapists to get away while imprisoning a number
of victims under the charge of adultery. She shows that not only are these laws not
at all based on Islam, being almost identical to rape laws that had been enacted by
the British during their colonial government, and that both the laws as well as the
behaviour of the criminal justice system is the product of a patriarchal society that
does not show much sympathy for women and their suffering. Furthermore, by a
close examination of both the Quran and hadith, she shows that the justification

offered for these laws and their content clearly contradicts Islamic injunctions with
regard to both rape and adultery, an argument employed by many womens rights
activists within Pakistan.49 But some, such as Wadud, engage in a much more
grand and wideranging project in terms of examining the question of what status
Islam accords women in a more comprehensive sense, which gives us an idea of the
larger aims of the Islamic feminist movements. For instance, one could consider
the work of Haifa Jawad as an example of this. Through a analysis of the Quran and
sayings of the Prophet, she lays out a list of the basic rights which a woman is
specifically meant to have according to Islam as a means of ending their
subjugation in eight century Arabia (which include the right to independent
ownership and economic activity, the right to choose whom to marry and the right
to end an unsuccessful marriage, the right to education, the right to her identity,
the right to sexual pleasure within the boundaries of lawful marriage, the right to
inheritance, the right to participate in public affairs and the right to be respected)
and which, properly understood, insists for every woman the option of living a life
she would choose, with freedom and the opportunity to develop her potential and
live a life she finds meaningful and fulfilling.50 One can see in the work of women
(and men) like Jawad and Wadud the outlines of an agenda for womens rights that
should probably be seen as similar to many feminist activists in the West and
Western feminists should find similar to their own, though justified in a very
different framework, and which is probably not been achieved even in a number of
Western societies, let alone those in the Muslim world.

Perm vs Ali Alt

Hirsi alis thoughts on islam fail to solve, only by considering
every viewpoint without reductionism can we solve
Ghorashi 03<Halleh Ghorashi: Ayaan Hirsi Ali: daring or dogmatic? Debates on
multiculturalism and emancipation in the Netherlands. In: Toon van Meijl, Henk
Driessen (Hrsg.): Multiple identifications and the self. Stichting Focaal, Utrecht 2003,
S. 163 172
http://www.kanakattak.de/ka/down/pdf/amr/Halleh_Gorashi_Forum_Focaal_Final.pdf>
their thoughts as long as those thoughts were not forced on me. And it is here that
Ayaan and I differ. I believe that the standpoints of Ayaan on the emancipation of
Islamic women migrants are too simplistic, too reductionist, and too dogmatic. I
recognize these standpoints from my own experiences in Iran. I used to be a very
strict atheist and was against belief in any religion. However I never admitted that
my belief in Marxism was as religious as it could get. I believed strongly in the
slogan that religion is the opium of the people and for me, and for many others,
this was enough to be considered an intellectual. Distancing oneself from Islam and
calling religion backward often sufficed to feel like and be considered as an
enlightened person. It was in the Netherlands that I realized how shortsighted and
dogmatic this kind of thought was. I found out that real enlightenment does not
come from exclusion but inclusion of thoughts. Real enlightenment means thinking
and reflecting upon ones own thoughts, and being brave enough to listen to the
other. The art of knowing is not in excluding other ideas by suppressing or ignoring
them; the art is to confront other ideas through dialogue. The Dutch philosopher
Theo de Boer (1993) makes the interesting point that real dialogue happens when
one is able to suspend ones own ideas for a while in order to listen to anothers
arguments. This he considers as one of the basic conditions for any dialogue. I
would go one step further and believe that this is the fundamental act for
transcending notions that are taken for granted in ones own thinking. When one is
able to suspend ones own thoughts for a short while in order to really listen, a
space is created even if it is for a short while to challenge those notions that are
taken for granted. This is the moment when ones thought is truly challenged by the
other. In this way, one is able to transcend the limits of tacit knowledge. This kind of
approach requires bravery, because the mind is then vulnerable towards the
unknown by leaving the space open to absorb. To the contrary, the person who does
not make space for this type of dialog is trapped within the comfortable borders of
the taken for granted.

Perm vs Fem Alt2ac

Permutation do both the aff and the altenrative as an act of
Islamic Feminism
Feminism has become westernized and fails to incorporate
Muslim women- the perm resolves that distincniton
Malik 10 (Waleed Malik, York University - Osgoode Hall Law School, Carleton
University, Islamic Feminism, Critique: A worldwide journal of politics, Fall
2010)//ASMITH
In some ways the feminist challenge to patriarchy has been a defining feature of the
recent past, exploding in almost every region of the world and producing massive
change that had once seemed inconceivable. But it is a project that remain
incomplete and whose progress has been uneven, with some regions lagging far
behind others; one of those regions that has evoked particular concern in the past
few years is one typically called the Muslim world. Typical views of Muslim
women are surprisingly monolithic and persistent, seeing them as veiled and
victims of oppression that is either caused by Islam or justified by it1. For many
people, including Western feminists both in the West and in the Muslim world, the
only path of liberation for Muslim women is the transformation of their countries
into secular, Westernized states and to encourage an indigenous feminist
movement that mimics their Western counterparts. Hence they see only the secular
womens organizations operating in these countries as the only true feminist actors
in the Muslim world2. In recent decades, this project of secular feminism has
faced an increasingly challenging landscape in the Muslim world. Propelled by a
failure of secular and modernist ideologies to solve its problems and a complex web
of social, political and economic factors, the Muslim world has been in the throes
of an Islamic resurgence since the seventies, becoming increasingly hostile
towards secular feminism as an alien, imperialist force that violates the Islamic faith
that has been growing in importance3. There has also been a realization that,
despite making meaningful and significant gains for women in their respective
countries, most secular feminist groups remained restricted to a small, elite class
and failed to meaningfully help women in the lower classes and more traditional
segments of society4. There have also been increasing intellectual attacks on the
foundations of Western feminism. Post-colonial feminism, a relatively new
perspective, criticizes the typical depiction of women in the Third World, including in
the Muslim world, as a homogenous category of powerless victims who need to be
rescued by their liberated sisters in the West. Such a perspective, it is argued,
both ignores the agency and efforts of these women as they struggle to alter their
own realities and falsely depicts Islam as an undifferentiated monolith that is a
constant source of oppression for all Muslim women across time and space5.
Western feminists are attacked for assuming that the path they took in their
struggles ought to be replicated by other women across the world6 and for
neglecting the fact that these women, who have different histories, different
circumstances, and differently structured desires may choose to define their future
in different ways and through different frameworks7. Within the context of this

debate, the increasing presence and participation of women in Islamist

organizations and the emerging phenomenon of Islamic feminism is seen as an
encouraging sign by post-colonial feminists but is seen with suspicion and
sometimes outright horror by secular feminists who often try to explain away the
phenomena by using concepts such as false consciousness8. There is
considerable resistance against accepting them as partners in the debate and
struggles to determine womens rights and their future9. This paper, through a
rather brief and unavoidably selective overview of Islamic feminism, will argue
that these movements should be seen as actors who are struggling against a status
quo seen as unjust with the aim of changing it through a framework and language
that, while it may seem alien and odd to traditional feminist ears, feels legitimate
and familiar to those who use it. From this claim it would follow that perhaps an
Islamic feminist movement may offer a more successful avenue for changing the
status of women in the Muslim world, especially of those who were left uninspired
by secular feminism. It would also follow that, rather than opposing and demeaning
such movements, Western feminists ought to accept them as partners in their
debates, discourses, and efforts for shaping a better future for women in the Muslim
world.

Reject Hirsi Ali

Hirsi Alis scholarship is islamophobic and academically
bankrupt
Lean 14<Nathan Lean Author of The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right
Manufactures Fear of Muslims Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Neither a Critic of Islam, Nor a
Champion of Women's Rights Posted: 04/18/2014 6:12 pm EDT
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-lean/ayaan-hirsi-ali-neithera_b_5175604.html>
A "critic." That's a lukewarm description for someone who has expressed her
support for defeating Islam (not extremists, but the entire faith) by military means if
necessary. Let's be clear: Such measures do not constitute "criticism." Instead, they
are dangerously close to advocating genocide. Similarly, it is not "criticism" to
promote the idea that the 2010 massacre carried out by the Norwegian terrorist,
Anders Breivik, was a result of his supposed censorship. That is dangerously close to
justifying an act terrorism that killed 77 and injured more than 300 others. It is fine
to be a critic of Islam or any religion. But Hirsi Ali crosses a line. Suggesting that her
views are simply unfavorable normalizes extremism. It also dilutes genuine critiques
by lumping them into one vague category that contains calls for military action
against Muslims and reasoned negative appraisals alike. And, it legitimizes the idea
that reasoned criticism of Islam is enough to warrant the denial of a public platform.
Brandeis University's statement described Hirsi Ali as an "advocate for women's
rights." Others described her in the same way, including the New York Times
andUSA Today. While there's no doubt that Hirsi Ali has shed enormous light on
cruel practices that target some Muslim women (including female genital mutilation,
of which she was a victim), it feels cheap to hail her as a champion in that regard. It
is unclear how Hirsi Ali can be an advocate for Muslim women while simultaneously
calling for the outright defeat of their faith. Her tragic experiences seem to have
provoked within her an animus for Islam that she believes all women who suffer like
she did must share. In her attempt to "save" them from these practices (which are
mostly cultural, not religious), Hirsi Ali denies them the right to interpret their
religion differently -- to believe in the goodness of their faith and also bemoan its
severe interpretations. Instead she insists that their "nihilistic cult of death" is the
real culprit.

Perm vs Fem Alt1ar

The permutation is the best way to support feminism and
resolve Islamophobia
Moghadam 02 (Valentine M. Moghadam, Womens Studies Program,
Department of Sociology, Illinois State University)(Islamic Feminism and Its
Discontents: Toward a Resolution of the Debate, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture
and Society 2002, vol. 27, no. 4 2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights
reserved. 0097-9740/2002/2704-0004$10.00)//ASMITH
Does Islamic feminism challenge or reinforce the fusion of religion and politics/law?
Najmabadi celebrates Zanan for its receptivity to non-Islamic writers, which she
sees as blurring the divide between religious and secular thought (1998, 77). And
yet there is a need for separation of mosque and state, for a secular political
system, and for a deepening of secular thought, even though there are different
paths to and models of secularism and Iran will have to develop its own. The efforts
of believing women of the monotheistic faiths to subject their religious texts to a
feminist rereading, or to locate and emphasize the women-friendly and egalitarian
precepts within their religious texts, are to be supported. This is a legitimate and
historically necessary strategy to improve the status of women and to modernize
religious thought. In this respect, my position is different from that of Moghissi and
Shahidian, who dismiss feminist theology and deny its wider implications. And yet,
one cannot insist, as some Islamic reformists do, that the Islamic arguments are the
only ones that matter and that change will occur only as a result of the reform
movement within Islam. Islam in Iran may be experiencing a kind of Reformation,
but what will be equally if not more important for long-term social change in Iran
(and elsewhere in the Muslim world) is an Enlightenment. As such, the contributions
of nonreligious thinkers and activists, whether inside or outside Iran, will continue
the process of democratization and building of civil society that was initiated by the
Constitutional Revolution earlier in this century.31 In any event, it is clear that
despite the changes of the 1990s, the IRI is mired in a political, economic, and
cultural crisis that will only be overcome by major changes to its system of
governance. The continuing battle between conservatives and reformists (including
Islamic feminists) attests to this. What are some elements of a system of
governance and a legal system that could ensure greater social, gender, religious,
and ethnic equality? Some of these changes have been suggested by certain
intellectuals within the reform movement.32 Here I will offer some needed changes
from a secular feminist (Marxist-feminist) perspective. Religious doctrine should not
be the basis of laws, policies, or institutions. Irans constitution (or any other
constitution) should not state that Islam [or Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism] is
the official [or state or national] religion. Family law should not derive from
religious texts, whether in Iran or in Israel. Blasphemy laws should be removed, and
religion should be the subject of historical and critical inquiry. All citizens should be
equal before the law, with equal rights and obligations. Civil, political, and social
rights of citizens should be protected by the state and by the institutions of civil
society. This includes worker participation in decision making and an active role for
independent unions, professional associations, citizen groups, and so on. It should

be noted that Islam, like other monotheistic religions, does have humane,
compassionate, and egalitarian aspects. These may inspire civil codes, political
processes, social policies, and economic institutions. For example, the social justice
foundations of religious thought represent an important balance to the harsh
discipline of the capitalist market. The ban on usury in Islam and Catholicism is in
conflict with capitalisms creation of wealth through nonproductive financial
transactions and speculation, and this, to my mind, is progressive and should be
emphasized. Religious belief should be respected, and religious institutions should
have a place in civil society, but religion should not dominate the state and the law.
feminism an indigenous alternative to secular or Western-inspired feminism? Is it an
oxymoron, a contradiction in terms? Or is it part of the already diversified and
colorful spectrum of the transnational womens movement and a contributor to a
global feminism? There is no question that Islamic feminists have been inspired
by the writings and collective action of feminists from the West and the third world.
Any reading of the womens press in Iran reveals that Iranian women activists and
scholars, including those who define themselves as Muslim or Islamic and eschew
the label feminist, engage with transnational feminism. In a thoughtprovoking
book, Patricia Misciagno argues for a bottom-up or materialist approach to
feminist identity that hinges on womens praxis rather than their ideology. She
defines de facto feminist praxis as activity that runs counter to the ideology of
patriarchy, even while not directly addressing the issue of patriarchy as an
ideology (Misciagno 1997, 7071). Similarly, Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor note that
a concentration solely on ideas ignores the fact that feminists are social movement
actors situated in an organizational and movement context (1999, 364). Their
historical study shows that the meaning of feminism has changed over time and
from place to place and is often disputed. They emphasize the need to understand
what women (or men) in a specific historical location believed but also how they
constructed, sometimes through conflict with one another, a sense of togetherness
(364). Feminist disputes, they argue, take place within a social movement
community that, as it evolves, encompasses those who see gender as a major
category of analysis, who critique female disadvantage, and who work to improve
womens situations. They conclude by asserting that in every group, in every
place, at every time, the meaning of feminism is worked out in the course of being
and doing (382). The above analysis sheds light on our question and points the
way toward a resolution of the debate on Islamic feminism. For if feminism has
always been contested, if feminists should be defined by their praxis rather than by
a strict ideology, and if a feminist politics is shaped by its specific historical,
political, and cultural contexts, then it should be possible to identify Islamic
feminism as one feminism among many. Indeed, in my view, it is not particularly
useful to create absolute boundaries between Islamic feminism, Western
feminism, Latin American feminism, African feminism, Jewish feminism, and so on.
In the same way that liberal, socialist, Marxist, radical, cultural, and postmodern
feminisms (not to mention equality and difference feminisms, and first- and secondwave feminisms) are part of the feminist tradition, so are the various regional
manifestations part of the evolving political philosophy of feminism and the social
movement of women. At the beginning of the new millennium what appears to be
emerging is a global womens movement and a philosophy that not only draws on

the feminist classics but also reflects the social realities and concerns of women in
various parts of the world. To a very great extent, the Beijing Platform for Action,
adopted at the end of the Fourth World Conference on Women in September 1995,
is a manifesto of the global womens movement. It describes the problems facing
the vast majority of the women of the world and prescribes a set of actions to solve
the problems involving government, international agencies, nongovernmental
organizations, and the womens movement. That the Platform for Action was finally
agreed on by governments and womens organizations after many disagreements
confirms the multifaceted nature of global feminism and the capacity of the worlds
women to overcome some ideological and class differences and agree on measures
necessary for womens equality and empowerment. Feminism is a theoretical
perspective and a practice that criticizes social and gender inequalities, aims at
womens empowerment, and seeks to transform knowledgeand in some
interpretations, to transform socioeconomic structures, political power, and
international relations. Women, and not religion, should be at the center of that
theory and practice. It is not possible to defend as feminist the view that women
can attain equal status only in the context of Islam. This is a fundamentalist view,
not one compatible with feminism. And yet, around the world there will be different
strategies that women will pursue toward empowerment and transformation. We are
still grappling with understanding and theorizing those diverse political strategies.
In light of this, it serves no purpose to insist on a narrow definition of feminism, as
Moghissi and Shahidian appear to do. And when one recalls the difficult period that
the Iranian left went through after the Revolution, when disunity and fragmentation
reigned, it seems obvious that harsh attacks and denunciations of some feminists
by other feminists is hardly the way forward. This can only impede rather than
contribute to dialogue, knowledge, coalition building, and collective action.

2AC vs Word PIC

Perm/Specificity
Instrumentalization of the word Islamophobia should not
disincentive usage of the word- discussions on blatant
Islamophobia are still productive and resistance is critical
Schiffer and Wagner 11 (Sabine Schiffer is head of the Media Responsibility
Institute (IMV), Erlangen, Germany and author with Constantin Wagner of AntiSemitism and Islamophobia: a comparative analysis (Wassertrdingen, 2009).
Constantin Wagner researches Islam in European textbooks at the Georg Eckert
Institute and works for the IMV.)(Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia new enemies,
old patterns, Race & Class Copyright 2011 Institute of Race Relations, Vol. 52(3):
7784//ASMITH)
There can be no doubt that, empirically, a phenomenon exists that we describe as
Islamophobia and others describe as anti-Muslim racism or hostility to Islam.
One criticism of the term Islamophobia has been that it defames opponents of
Islamist movements. But even if it is true that the term can be instrumental ised,
that is not sufficient cause to stop using it. After all, racism, too, has varying
definitions, and is occasionally used in highly problematic ways. This does not mean
that there is no point in continuing to use the term, and certainly would not justify
denying its very existence. Looking at critical portrayals of Muslims from an antiracist perspective, there can be no doubt that Islam is openly being attacked
as Islam, and Muslims are openly being attacked as Muslims. The same
applies to physical violence. Islamophobes often try to legitimise their racism by
arguing that they have nothing against foreigners in general, and even add to their
credentials by explaining they are pro-Israeli; the problem, they explain, is
Muslims. Such Islamophobia has recently begun to be studied in Germany and
reported in a number of published pieces on racism and anti-racism.2 Given the
enormous popularity of blogs such as Politically Incorrect, which publishes nothing
but racist incitement specifically against Muslims, it is undeniable that there is a
racism that is directed primarily at (supposed) Muslims. The known racist blogs are
merely the tip of the iceberg, and can build on very widespread, historically based
anti-Muslim resentments.3 Although many images and points are familiar elements
of anti-immigration discourse and thus recognisable as elements of racism, the
empirical phenomenon of Islamophobia is not entirely coextensive with the
definition of racism (to the extent that there is a universally valid definition of the
term). This is because centuries-old anti-Muslim views inform, shape and extend the
current discourse. This gives anti-Muslim racism a specificity that distinguishes it
from other racisms. Furthermore, Islamophobia can be considered a new form of
racism, a cultural racism. The target of Islamophobia is not an imagined race, but
a group perceived as a religious community. It is easier to incite hatred using sup posed cultural as opposed to racial characteristics and this also affects the
intensity and nature of the necessary resistance.4

Offensek2 Solve
Using the word Islamophobia has the power to bring attention
to the irrational fears and marginalization of the Muslim
community
Page 12 (Page, Clarence. Columnist for the Chicago Tribune, has doctorates from
Columbia College Chicago, Lake Forest College, and Nazareth College in Rochester,
New York. Won the Oullitzer prize for commentary in 1989.) One word says it all:
Islamophobia, Philadelphia Tribune [Philadelphia, Pa] 09 Dec 2012: Volume 12 Issue
4 Pages 10A)//ASMITH
In its never-ending effort to avoid misleading language in news coverage, the
Associated Press Stylebook has decided to declare "Islamophobia," "homophobia"
and presumably other non-clinical uses of the word "phobia" to be a new taboo.
What's the problem? "It's just off the mark," AP deputy standards editor Dave
Minthorn explained to Politico. "It's ascribing a mental disability to someone and
suggests a knowledge that we don't have. It seems inaccurate. Instead, we would
use something more neutral: anti-gay, or some such, if we had reason to believe
that was the case." Too bad. Words have power. Striking out such commonly
used and unfortunately timely terms strikes me as a linguistic blow for blandness. I
hope that this move only is applied to news reporters who are obligated - as I was in
my earlier journalistic life - to sound detached, disinterested and objective. I
became an opinion writer so I could call out knuckleheads as we see them. Even so,
I don't want to overdo it. Terms like homophobia and Islamophobia are like "racist"
or "sexist," powerful invectives that get attention but also run the risk of turning off
dialogue before it can be turned on. But psychologist George Weinberg, who coined
the word "homophobia" in his 1972 book "Society and the Healthy Homosexual,"
disagreed with the AP's decision, according to The Advocate, a leading gay-oriented
magazine. The "hard-won word" was so politically potent that it "made all the
difference to city councils and other people I spoke to," Weinberg told interviewer
Andy Humm. Whether homophobia is based on fear or "Maybe envy in some cases,"
it shouldn't matter, he said: "We have no other word for what we're talking about,
and this one is well established." As for Islamophobia, I can think of no better word
to describe some of the irrational fears I have seen on public display, especially
since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Yet one expert, American Muslim author
Eboo Patel, founding president of the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core and
member of President Obama's inaugural advisory council on faithbased initiatives,
tried to give the argument a constructive spin: "For me, the most important thing to
highlight is not the particular name we give to the irrational fear of a particular
identity group," he told me in an email exchange. "It's the fact that this fear not only
marginalizes the group in question, but violates the very idea of America. Our
nation is based on welcoming the contributions of all communities - gays, Muslims,
Evangelicals, lews, etc - and nurturing cooperation between them." That's the
central theme of "Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America,"
Patel's new instructive and beautifully written memoir on how post-9/11 fears and
suspicions affected him as a Muslim, born in Mumbai, India, 37 years ago and raised

in suburban Chicago. The book recounts his personal journey through the oftenboiling pot of America's ethnic diversity, beginning with his shock and dismay over
the backlash against Cordoba House in the summer of 2010. The proposed Muslim
community center in Manhattan would have an interfaith theme, open to all, much
like the YMCA or a lewish Community Center. But you may know it better as the
"Victory Mosque at Ground Zero." Although the site was two blocks from Ground
Zero and not a mosque - although the facility, renamed Park51, includes a carpeted
prayer room - the inflammatory label was posted by conservative firebrand blogger
Pamela Geller - and picked up by the New York Post, Fox News and other media as
an insult to the site where 3,000 Americans were killed by Muslim fanatics.
Suddenly, the father of the project, Imam Feisal Abdul Raul, a well-known proponent
of better interfaith relations who had condemned the Sept. 11 attacks, was being
smeared as a terrorist conspirator, especially in anti-Muslim websites. And Patel
even came across his own name described in the anti-Muslim blogosphere as a
"Muslim terrorist." A year earlier, he had been named by US News and World Report
as one of "America's Best Leaders" for promoting interfaith cooperation. But all
Muslims look alike to some knuckleheads. That's how Islamophobia works. When the
tag fits, wear it.

2nc A2 Their Stuff

The word Islamophobia is not a euphemism and is politically
correct
Lorente 10 (Javier Rosn Lorente, PhD. in Social Anthropology from the
University of Granada and is currently researcher at Casa rabe e Instituto
Internacional de Estudios rabes y del Mundo Musulmn (Spain). Discrepancies
Around the Use of the Term Islamophobia, The Omar Khayyam Center for
Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science, HUMAN ARCHITECTURE:
JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, VIII, 2, FALL 2010, 115128)//ASMITH
Ultimately, it must be stressed that since the term Islamophobia was coined in the
Runnymede Trust report, some researchers and essayists have considered that it
was generated as part of politically correct discourse. From this viewpoint
Islamophobia is an invention, a rhetorical term meant to be distant from any sort
of euphemism and/or criticism addressed to both Muslims and the religion they
profess. 24 At present, criticism of the politically correct has shifted to a
categorical pronouncement via which all aseptic discourse in favour of the
integration and understanding of a culture, way of life and respect for traditions,
etc., of Arab and/or Muslim communities and individuals on a basis of equality is a
first person attack directed at the counterpart which apparently seeks to selfascribe or self-define itself as Islamophobic, so as to legitimize any kind of criticism
or socio-political response to those seeking to further a solid knowledge which
transcends the essentialist and manipulative discourse seemingly imposed on Islam
and Muslims who live in European societies and the West in general. In this regard,
the report (1997) made clear that not all criticism is based, or has to be based, on a
stereotypical construction of the Arab and Muslim world, and that therefore as it
does not depend on prejudices there are certain questions that can or should be
criticized.

2AC vs Speaking for Others

2ac Islamophobia
The content of the aff should precede who says itthe idea of
a legitimate speaker descends into anti-arab dogma
Salaita, 2006 (Steven, associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, Anti-Arab
Racism in the USA, p. 20)
Of course, the chance of this situation being repeated in the Arab American
community is minimal. Anti-Arab racism is much too new a political subject to
induce such internal squabbling; and besides, the moral imperative to free Palestine
is considerably less questionable than the racism that underlies Zionist definitions
of anti-Semitism. In other words, the Arab American community can battle anti-Arab
racism with a clear conscience because our anti-racist discourse is free of the
racism that permeates so many aspects of modern Zionism. We should remember,
however, that notions of legitimacy usually descend into disempowering egoism. It
is crucial to remain focused on the goal of eliminating a deeply rooted anti-Arab
racism rather than simply on the credibility of the speaker as he or she relates to
the criteria others have established to judge his or her existence. While I dislike the
work of scholars such as Fouad Ajami, whose discourse ceaselessly legitimizes antiArab racism, I refuse to call him self-hating or deem him anything less than Arab.10
To do so would result in a dogmatic intellectual paradigm whether or not I would
actually vocalize one because the dogma would be inherent in the critique. Those
who disagree with Ajami can challenge him eloquently without destroying the
diversity of the Arab and Arab American communities.

2ac Essentialism
Claiming that only the victims of oppression can understand it
dooms identity politics and reproduces exclusion
Bhambra 10U Warwick
ANDVictoria MargreeSchool of Humanities, U Brighton (Identity Politics and the
Need for a Tomorrow,
http://www.academia.edu/471824/Identity_Politics_and_the_Need_for_a_Tomorrow_)
It is inexcusable to build analyses of historical experience around exclusions,
exclusions that stipulate, for instance, that only women can understand feminine
experience, only Jews can understand Jewish suffering, only formerly colonial
subjects can understand colonial experience (Said 1993: 35). The idea of a politics
underpinned by solidarities based on sameness has a long history in the critical
tradition. Marxs initial conceptualisation of the standpoint of the proletariat (albeit,
significantly different from those of subsequent developments of standpoint
epistemology) has been used by feminist theorists as well as those arguing for a
post-colonial perspective in terms of the subaltern, and, more recently, for a dalit
standpoint (Hart- sock 1984, Guha 1983, Rege 1998, 2000). However, while using
identity as the basis of political action has been seen to be powerful (and effective),
it has also increasingly become seen as problematic. The exclusionary politics of
movements such as black power, much radical and lesbian feminism, and latterly,
movements for ethnic purity and/or religious integrity, for example, have yielded a
deep concern with the programme of separation and isolationism that such
movements are often seen to be based upon. For many critics, more troubling still
has been the usually accompanying claim that only women can be feminists, or only
black people can work against racism, or only dalits against caste oppression, and
so on. A position which states that only those who have experienced an injustice
can understand and thus act effectively upon it seems to rest upon an essentialist
theory of identity which assumes that the possibility of knowledge about particular
situations is restricted to ones possession of the relevant (seemingly) irreducible
traits (being female, black, dalit, and so forth). Arguably, one consequence of these
separatist tendencies is that they perpetuate the individualist fallacy that
oppressive social relationships can be reformed by particular subjects without the
broader agreement of others who, together, constitute the social relations within
which the injustices are embedded. But even where the limitations of a purely
exclusionary form of identity politics are recognised, many theorists continue,
nevertheless, to argue for a form of strategic essentialism (Fuss 1989, Spivak
2003) suggesting that where structures of inequality overlap with categories of
identity, then a politics based on those identities is both liberatory and necessary
(Bramen 2002).

2ac Cant Disclose

The political model of forcing people to disclose their identities
ignores the dangers and exposure to racism this can produce
for Arab bodies
Salaita, 2006 (Steven, associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, Anti-Arab
Racism in the USA, p. 23-24)
The final point reminds me of an Arab Student Association (ASA) meeting some
years back at the University of Oklahoma when I was in graduate school. We were a
dedicated group headed by a brilliant and indefatigable Palestinian international
student named Mohammad Al-Ramahi. At this meeting we were debating how we
might best raise awareness on campus about Israels devastating violence in the
Occupied Territories. In attendance was a young White woman, a motivated
progressive activist from an affluent family. The rest of the ASA was comprised of
international students from the Near East and a few Arab Americans. Mohammad
wanted to produce a Palestine Week with an information booth, documentary film
screenings, a community dinner, and Norman Finkelstein as the keynote speaker.
(Finkelstein ended up coming and delivered a remarkable speech.) The Arab
students agreed with this plan, but the young woman argued that we were being
too moderate and suggested that we set up a roadblock on the busiest street on
campus to illustrate the disruptiveness of Israeli checkpoints . It was a good idea in
theory (and in fact was done at UC-Berkeley and a few other campuses), but
immediately people in the group balked. What if we get arrested?, one of the
international students asked. Thats the point, she responded. Itll be an amazing
statement. The meeting wound down with a palpable sense of tension. I tell this
story because the White woman had no understanding of the cultural sensibilities
with which she was dealing. Like the guest on WORT, she purported to know better
than the Arabs what is best for them. It never occurred to her that jail has a much
different connotation to the Arabs than to her, an upper-class blond American
woman whose father had the influence to save her from incarceration. Nor did it
occur to her that the Arab students were already evincing courage because their
parents had told them repeatedly not to get involved in politics, given that political
involvement in the Arab World often leads to imprisonment, torture, or even death.
After 9/11, things werent much better in the United States, particularly for Arab
students, for whom civil disobedience can easily result in arrest without
representation or deportation without due process. Or, as in the case of the late
Farouk Abdel-Muhti, much worse (Abdel-Muhti was a secular Palestinian activist who
was arrested after 9/11, tortured, and kept in solitary confinement for over eight
months).11

A2 Social Location**
Being able to talk about your personal issues is the privilege
who is here to speak about their experience at Guantanamo?
their kritik mirrors acts of distancing that say we should only
focus on whats in our purviewislamophobic policies like
indefinite detention have maintained legitimacy precisely
because we view them as out there and not affecting uswe
must bring the voices of those who cant speak for themselves
here
Park 10
[2010, James Park, EFFECTUATING PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE IN ENDING INDEFINITE
DETENTION: HISTORICAL REPETITION AND THE CASE OF THE UYGHURS, 31 Whittier
L. Rev. 785]
Orwell once wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier regarding empire and the complicity of a nation that
enjoys its fruits: For in the last resort, the only important question is, Do you want the British
Empire to hold together or do you want it to disintegrate ?... For, apart from any other
consideration, the high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon our keeping a
tight hold on the Empire, particularly the tropical portions of it such as India and
Africa. Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a
hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation . 128 How the old British
Empire relates to the detention of Haitians and Uyghurs at Guantanamo Bay
involves the very question of conscious awareness and the difficulties in piercing
the veil of physical and metaphysical detachment . 129 Descriptions of events
transcribed through the filter of media form a buffer to action due to its intangible
nature-there is an unreality to the medium of television where elements of reality that play
across the screen can take on the discursive properties of the imaginary. 130 As a result, there can be quiet
and passive acquiescence when terms, such as, "exceptional," "unprecedented,"
and "the normal rules do not apply" are heard and used to form the exigencies and
justifications for "intensive interrogation methods" and indefinite detention without
charge. 131 Spatial separation and isolation also create impediments to rectifying injustice. In the case of the
George

Haitian refugees, service organizations had to go through the judiciary and spend years in litigation to gain access
to the refugees at Guantanamo Bay. 13 In the case of Guantanamo Bay detainees caught up in the "War on Terror,"
there were explicated policies against denying access. 133 For instance, "[a] confidential 2003 manual for operating
the Guantanamo detention center shows that military officials had a policy of denying detainees access to
independent monitors" from the Red Cross. 134 In other words, those who had done no wrong were denied access

The indefinite detention of the Haitians and Uyghurs and the years
they have spent and are spending in extra-territorial detention can , similarly, be
examined through the prism of "punishment" as there have been alterations to the
order and methodology of punishment and incarceration over time . 135 Punishment
has changed from something that was acutely visible to something that
has become cloaked and secreted away. 136 At one time, the public spectacle of
punishment took center stage as a gory spectacle of physical pain. 137 These dramatic displays of
and, as a result, justice.

"justice" provided all concerned with a specific role: The criminal to be punished acted as the star, the innocent
public witnesses supplied the captivated audience, and the government authority directed this macabre
melodrama. 138 These displays

were therefore meant to educate both the individual criminals

living (or in some cases dying), as well as the watching public as to the concepts of justice
and punishment. 139 These theatrics later gave way to a less sensational mode of
education which focused less on physical torment in pursuit of justice and sought to
internalize a sense of a moral code in all individuals. 140 Thus, what was once a passive
group of mere voyeurs has been disbanded to become a cluster of individual
productions-each person now internalizes and imagines the process of punishment
through the censored lens of courtroom dramas and the scripted cinema of the
prison yard in popular culture , rather than bear witness to the realities of
society's retribution. This more sanitary, internal approach to punishment is
particularly pronounced when examined in the context of the "War on
Terror." In this instance, the institutions of punishment are not only removed from the
public eye, but from the very soil of our nation . 141 In point of fact, Guantanamo Bay is
based in a country where United States citizens cannot visit without obtaining a
license through the United States government due to a long-existing trade embargo which has
only recently been revisited. 142 Guantanamo Bay has been argued to be territory that is
outside the bounds of United States' sovereignty , thereby, prohibiting detainees from
invoking habeas corpus to challenge their detention. 143 Proponents of this argument used the
United States Supreme Court decision in Johnson v. Eisentrager, decided in 1950, which held that those detained in
territories beyond the borders of United States sovereignty are unable to invoke the writ of habeas corpus. 144
Thus, Guantanamo Bay was argued to be the sovereign territory of the nation of Cuba as a convenient fiction

This argument was shattered when the

United States Supreme Court held that habeas corpus for "War on Terror" detainees
was due in Boumediene v. Bus h, decided in 2008. 146 Even further tucked away from the
public eye are the secret prisons-socalled "black sites"-instituted by the Bush
Administration, operating extra-judicially and containing the faceless "ghost detainee," subject to "intensive
interrogation methods."' 147 As the form of punishment and detention shifts further afield,
it takes on a profound dimension of separation . George Orwell, in the excerpt above,
was alluding to the natural tendency to accept the conditions with which people are
presented. The automatic supposition that what may be taking placing is unjust and
perhaps beyond the constitutional limits can be seemingly driven from
conscious awareness by the public's separation from events and the lack
of information. As a consequence, justice has proceeded at a slow, aggravated
plod in rectifying wrong where, oftentimes, individuals are simply "released" quietly
after years of imprisonment without the subject of their innocence ever being
addressed.
despite the years of isolation between the two nations. 145

2AC vs Anti-Blackness

Focus on Arabs Good

Post 9/11 Police surveillance has exclusively focused on
American Arabs
Cuny Law 13 (Cuny Law. Mapping Muslims. March 11, 2013.
http://www.law.cuny .edu/academics/clinics/immigration/clear/Mapping-Muslims.pdf.
Page 5-6.)//EMerz
NYPD surveillance of political groups is ongoing.12 But after September 11, 2001,
the NYPD fixed its attention on American Muslims. While the methods are
reminiscent of prior incarnations of NYPD spying, here the police uniquely focused
on religion and religious practice. For example, the NYPD took special interest in
signs of Muslim religiosity and actively implemented a surveillance program guided
by a deeply flawed theory of Muslim radicalization. As a result, NYPD agents
documented how many times a day Muslim students prayed during a university
whitewater rafting trip,13 which Egyptian businesses shut their doors for daily
prayers,14 which restaurants played Al-Jazeera, and which Newark businesses sold
halal products and alcohol.15 Not only did the NYPD single out American Muslims
for surveillance, but officers found every facet of American Muslim religiosity and
outward practice of Islam whether Sunni or Shia worthy of exceptional scrutiny.
Further, where the NYPD was spying in Arab neighborhoods with sizeable
populations of Syrian Jews and Egyptian Christians, the intelligence unit explicitly
focused on the Muslim populations.16 Thus, NYPD sketched a detailed picture of the
American Muslim community throughout New York Citys five boroughs and beyond,
in New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. They sent undercover officers, whom
they called rakers, into identified neighborhoods to isolate what the NYPD called
hot-spots: restaurants, cafes, halal meat shops and hookah bars. Capitalizing on
their ability to recruit a diverse force with diverse language capabilities, the NYPD
was able to send officers with various ethnic and linguistic backgrounds into
communities, matching them accordingly.17 Undercover Pakistani officers were sent
into Pakistani communities and Arabic-speaking officers were dispatched into the
Egyptian community to listen to neighborhood gossip and get an overall feel for
the community.18 They were instructed to visit schools and interact with business
owners and patrons to gauge sentiment.19 They identified locations where
community members socialize (coffee shops, hookah bars) and participated in
community cricket matches and student trips.20 Blending into every facet of their
assigned neighborhoods, rakers discreetly set-up listening posts and observed
everything from idle chatter after community prayers to the type of pizza an Arabowned pizzeria served.21 At the end of the day, the NYPD officers were instructed to
record every detail of what they heard, individuals they spoke with, and community
happenings in a daily activity report. The NYPD also employed crawlers, who were
informants tasked with infiltrating mosques and religious events, recording what the
imam or congregants say, or photographing lists of attendees. Finally, NYPD
handlers instructed informants to engage with Muslim community members and
employ a tactic dubbed create and capture, where the informant would try to
start a conversation about terrorism or another controversial topic, record the
response elicited, and share it with the NYPD. Investigative reporters gave the

public documentation proving the existence and sweep of a secret intelligence

program that communities had long suspected they were dealing with in their own
experiences. Still, individuals, organizations, mosques and businesses throughout
New York were shocked to see their names in classified NYPD documents. The
geographical scope was expansive: the NYPD monitored Muslim Students
Associations from Philadelphia to New Haven; rakers had visited, observed and
documented American Muslim businesses from Newark to Queens; and mosque
crawlers had spied and reported on sermons and post-Friday prayer conversations
in more than 250 mosques.22 The NYPD was monitoring even its closest partners in
anti-terrorism work, including imams who frequently appeared at the Mayors
side.23 The leaked documents also confirmed one of the communities worst fears:
an extensive collaboration between the precinct-level police doing beat work and
the Intelligence Division, as the Intelligence Division mined precincts local
knowledge of the communities they are meant to serve and to protect.24 For
example, the Citywide Debriefing Team, a unit within the Intelligence Division, was
tasked with going to precincts or jails to question or debrief, in NYPD terms
arrestees of Muslim or Arab background.25 As CLEAR and AALDEF clients
experiences confirmed, upon being taken to the precinct for a traffic violation, or
even for filing an identity theft complaint individuals have been met by officers or
detectives from another unit and questioned about their community, and their
religious or political beliefs.

Perm/Racialized as Black
Muslim people are marked as black and also face structural
racism perpetuated by state policy
Wing 3 (Adrien Katherine Wing, Civil Rights in the Post 911 World: Critical Race
Praxis, Coalition Building, and the War on Terrorism. 2003. Vol. 63 p. 3.
http://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/lalrev/v ol63/iss3/6)//EMerz
In my view, we must expand our civil rights efforts beyond all the above mentioned
groups to include those that do not easily fit into historic racial categories:
specifically Arabs and Muslims, who have faced especially increased discrimination
since September 11, 2001. That day clearly changed the United States, if not the
world, in very profound ways. Since then, the War on Terrorism has taken
precedence in both U.S. foreign and domestic policy. In late 2001, the foreign policy
aspect manifested itself as a literal war in Afghanistan that overthrew the globally
despised Taliban regime. Shortly after the symposium for which this paper was
composed took place, the U.S. launched a war against Iraq to overthrow its long
term leader Saddam Hussein and destroy any weapons of mass destruction.8 On
the domestic front, these wars have had profound effects on the civil liberties of
both noncitizens and citizens, particularly Arabs, Muslims, and those who resemble
them.9 Part II of this article details how the civil rights of Arabs and Muslims have
been restricted both before and after September 11, 2001.10 Using a Critical Race
Theory (CRT)11 analysis, we shall see how these groups have been socially
constructed as ''Black," with the negative legal connotations historically attributed
to that designation. For example, racial profiling, which originated as a term
synonymous with Blacks and police traffic stops,12 now equally applies to both
Arabs and Muslims in many contexts. The pan-ethnicity term "Arab" and the
religious signifier "Muslim" have been socially constructed as a synonymous "race"
in the United States. While there are over 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide, only 15%
are Arab.41 In the U.S., it is unclear, but there may be between 4-8 million Muslims, of whom
22.4% are U.S. born and 23.8% are African American . There may be 3 million Arabs in the U.S.,
originating from 22 countries,43 and the Arab American Institute has revealed the little known fact that nearly

three quarters of Arab Americans are Christians .44 In an important case, St. Francis College v. AlKhazraji, the Supreme Court acknowledged that Arabs can be discriminated against on
account of their race. Interestingly, those who merely look like Arabs or Muslims may be
racially profiled on that basis as well. The double group can thus be considered larger than the number of
actual members. According to one commentator, there may be, in this country, 7 million Arabs, 8 million Muslims,
and 1.6 million South Asians, Latinos, and African Americans who could look "Arab," probably

at least 10

million people, which I think even that is a vast underestimate of the numbers of the Blacks and Latinos in
America who could pass as Arab. One African American radio personality stated that French citizen
Zacharias Moussaoui, native of Morocco, who may have been the twentieth September 11 hijacker, looks like "a
brother from around the way.' 7

Liminal Zone
The Muslim identity was socialized long before 9/11 in relation
to whiteness Muslims were forced into a liminal zone
between whiteness and blackness
Elver, 12 Professor of Global Studies at Cal Berkeley (Hilal, " TEN YEARS AFTER
9/11: RETHINKING COUNTERTERRORISM: Racializing Islam Before and After 9/11:
From Melting Pot to Islamophobia", in Transnational Law and Contemporary
Problems Vol. 21 Issue 119, p. 7//ejh)

My first personal experience with race consciousness was in 1993 when my 13-yearold daughter started the 9th grade at a local public high school in Ann Arbor. I
received a warning from her German language teacher that she was spending time
with African American students, which she described as a "potentially dangerous
group." She said I should be careful about my daughter's friends. However, I learned
from my daughter that they were the only kids in school friendly with her even
though some of the African American kids questioned her presence in the group as
she was a "white girl." Soon someone explained that "she is not white, she is a
Muslim!" This was the first knowledge I re-ceived that being white or black is much
more than one's skin color! Muslims were considered non-white in this country, yet
not exactly black, either. We entered our new lives with this new identity.

A2 Civil Society
Americanization policies perpetuated the alienation of Muslim
communities and wrote them out of social life and civil society
as more people immigrated islamophobia grew from a
complex historical relationship between the east and west
Elver, 12 Professor of Global Studies at Cal Berkeley (Hilal, " TEN YEARS AFTER
9/11: RETHINKING COUNTERTERRORISM: Racializing Islam Before and After 9/11:
From Melting Pot to Islamophobia", in Transnational Law and Contemporary
Problems Vol. 21 Issue 119, p. 7//ejh)
In 1952, Congress finally abandoned the race-based system of naturalization that
had been in place since 1790. n74 Nevertheless, despite ongoing reforms, a strong
"assimilation" policy existed in the immigration system even in the late 1990s. "For
example, the final report of the Commission on Immigration Reform in 1997 called
for the "Ameri-canization' of new immigrants and emphasized the importance of
these new immigrant groups to conform to white, Christian, Western European
norms, especially in their adoption of English as their primary language." n75
Misunderstandings, prejudice, and hatred have become more pronounced during
the last three decades as an asso-ciation with terrorism has smeared the reputation
of Islam and Muslims. Belonging to a minority religion is always dif-ficult even in the
United States, one of the most liberal countries in the world. Yet it has a strong
culture of Christianity that recently transformed itself to a Judeo-Christian
understanding. Conditions for Muslims are further complicated by the historical
relationship between Islam and Christianity, especially between the West and
Muslim societies, which includes everything from memories of the Crusades and
European colonialism to what many perceive as the distorted image of Islam
projected by Orientalist scholarship and the media, and finally to the hegemony and
anti-Islamic policies of the West, in particular the United States. n76
"Living as a minority in a dominant culture hostile to Islam, Muslims are often
alienated and feel powerless." n77 Seemingly multicultural ideas of American
religious pluralism eventually created a dominant religion and subordination of the
others. As members of a minority faith living in a non-Islamic country, Muslims were
subject to "marginality" despite the American civil tradition that promises
unqualified religious liberty and racial equality. n78

A2 Exclusive Focus Good

The racialization of Islam has complicated and convoluted
categories the groups subject to islamophobia are large and
variegated and includes both black folks and tons of others
Elver, 12 Professor of Global Studies at Cal Berkeley (Hilal, " TEN YEARS AFTER
9/11: RETHINKING COUNTERTERRORISM: Racializing Islam Before and After 9/11:
From Melting Pot to Islamophobia", in Transnational Law and Contemporary
Problems Vol. 21 Issue 119, p. 7//ejh)

The category of "Muslim" in the United States is as problematic as any other racial
or ethnic category, if not more so because of significant intra-group differences.
What is distinct about this new category is the fact that this group is not based on
ethnic, linguistic, national, or geographical similarities, but on common religion.
Therefore, "the Muslims of America are far from homogeneous in their composition
and in their attitudes and practices. American Islam is a mo-saic of many ethnic,
racial, and national groups." n8 The Muslim minority comes from diverse national
origins and cul-tural backgrounds comprising as many as sixty-five countries. n9
"They speak a wide variety of languages and represent a range of cultural,
economic, educational, sectarian, and ideological positions." n10
Many recent studies describe the group affected by Islamophobia as "Muslims,"
"Middle Easterners," or "Muslims and Arabs." However, "Arab," and "Middle
Easterner" categories include a significant number of non-Muslims as well. The
majority of Arabs and Middle Easterners in the United States are not Muslims but
Christians. Moreover, most Muslim Americans in the United States are not Arabs.
Furthermore, unlike other groups, the category of Muslim in the United States
covers not only immigrant communities but also includes a significant number of
native born African American citizens . n11 This complexity is one of the markers of
the racialization of Islam in the United States, as "Mus-lim looking people" are
subject to hate crimes and social discrimination .

A2 Only Post 9/11

Islamophobia has existed in the US long before 9/11- theres
decades of racism
Wing 3 (Adrien Katherine Wing, Civil Rights in the Post 911 World: Critical Race
Praxis, Coalition Building, and the War on Terrorism. 2003. Vol. 63 p. 723-724).
http://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/ lalrev/vol63/iss3/6)//EMerz
Arabs and Muslims were racially profiled, victimized, and demonized as terrorists
well before September 11.52 These activities have included: physical attacks by
individuals and pro-Israel groups such as the Jewish Defense League; political
attacks by pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Birth, as well as
many other Democratic and Republican Party affiliated entities; blacklisting of prominent
Arab American intellectuals such as Columbia professor Edward Said and Harvard professor Walid Khalidi;
as well as vicious stereotypes in films and television that would not be tolerated if used to
characterize other groups.53 For example, Jack Shaheen surveyed a number of movies and found the following
characterizations of Arabs and Muslims: "assholes," "bastards," "camel-dicks," "pigs," "devil-worshipers, " ''jackels,"
"rats," "rag-heads," "towel-heads," "scum-buckets," "sons-of-dogs," "buzzards of the jungle," "sons-of-whores,"
"sons-of-unnamed goats," and "sons-of-she-camels."54 It is difficult to imagine the movie industry applying those
sorts of labels to Blacks or Jews today.

Arab American campaign contributions have been

returned as if Arab citizens have no right to participate in American politics .5 AntiArab and anti-Muslim activities have intensified during periods of high tensions in the
Middle East, such as the 1980 Iran Hostage situation, 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, 1986
war against Libya, and the 1991 Gulf war.

Early instances of terrorism promoted xenophobia and

vilanized those associated with Islam, forcing homogenization
and the denial of identity
Elver, 12 Professor of Global Studies at Cal Berkeley (Hilal, " TEN YEARS AFTER
9/11: RETHINKING COUNTERTERRORISM: Racializing Islam Before and After 9/11:
From Melting Pot to Islamophobia", in Transnational Law and Contemporary
Problems Vol. 21 Issue 119, p. 7//ejh)
The new era of awakening arrived in 1995, when Timothy McVeigh exploded a public
building killing hundreds of innocent people in Oklahoma City. I was at the airport,
returning from an American Society of International Law meeting in New York on my
way to Malta. They kept me at the airport the whole day without any explanation,
and then sent me home on another flight. I figured that by carrying a Turkish
passport I became an instant suspect in terror cases. On the morning of 9/11, as I
watched the horror on TV, I hoped that the names of terrorists were not similar to
mine! Unfortunately they were. Since then, my travel experiences have been
difficult and humiliating. Visa applica-tions to Europe were nightmarish, if not
humiliating. They involved long investigations, background checks, visa offic-ers
accusing me of fabricating my documents. Flying back and forth was a stigmatizing
experience as I was "random-ly" searched because of my Turkish passport.
Sometimes, they stamped my boarding card with a red sign, which meant that they
searched me again and again each time I changed planes, until I reached my final
destination. After 9/11, every time I returned to the United States immigration

officers interviewed me in a back room, sometimes for hours, after long trips from
Europe. They asked what is wrong with me that I am still a Turkish citizen , despite
my green card, my profession, and my American husband. I should be an American
citizen. I became an American citizen!

2ac vs. Misc

A2 Foucault K
The aff is the only way to reverse the underlying logic of
governmentalityislamophobia comes first
Kaya 11 (Ayhan Kaya, Willy Brandt Professor at Malm University, and Professor
of Politics at Istanbul Bilgi University)(Islamophobia as a form of Governmentality:
Unbearable Weightiness of the Politics of Fear, Willy Brandt Series of Working
Papers in International Migration and Ethnic Relations 1/11, 2011, Malm Institute
for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM))//ASMITH
As a discourse that travels between state, civil society, and citizens, that produces
and organizes subjects, and that is used by subjects to govern themselves,
islamophobia could also be seen to embody what Foucault formulated as a
distinctive feature of modern governmentality. An analysis of modern government
needs to pay particular attention to the role accorded to indirect mechanisms for
aligning economic, social and personal conduct with socio-political objectives.
Today, political power is exercised through a set of multiple agencies and
techniques, some of which are only loosely associated with the executives and
bureaucracies of the formal organs of state (Miller and Rose, 2011: 26). The state is
not the source or agent of all governing power, nor does it monopolize political
power; rather, the powers and rationalities governing individual subjects and the
population as a whole operate through a range of formally nonpolitical knowledges
and institutions. The ensemble of legal and nonlegal, pedagogical, cultural,
religious, nationalist, and social discourses of Islamophobia together produce what
Foucault understands as the signature of modern governmentality. According to
Foucault, modern governmental rationality is simultaneously about individualizing
and totalizing: that is, about finding answers to the question of what it is for an
individual, and for a society or population of individuals, to be governed or
governable (Gordon, 1991: 36). Simultaneously totalizing and individualizing,
gathering and distinguishing, and achieving each effect through its seeming
opposite, Islamophobia emerges as one technique in an arsenal for organizing and
managing large and potentially disruptive populations. As such, it is a strand of
biopower, that modality of power so named by Foucault because it operates through
the orchestration and regulation of life rather than the threat of death (Brockling et
al., 2011; Miller and Rose, 2008; Brown, 2006). The orchaestration and regulation of
life in modern societies is operationalized by the states through multiple forms of
governmentality ranging from nationalism to Islamophobia, or from racism to
multiculturalism. Michel Foucault defines governmentality as the ensemble formed
by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations and
tactics that allow this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its
target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its
essential technical means apparatuses of security. In other words, governmentality
refers to the practices which characterise the form of supervision a state exercises
over its subjects, their wealth, misfortunes, customs, bodies, souls and habits
(Foucault, 1979). It is the conduct of conduct, that is to say a form of activity aiming
to shape, guide or affect the conduct of individuals or groups. The semantic linking
of governing (gouverner) and modes of thought (mentalit) indicates that it is not

possible to study the technologies of power without an analysis of the political

rationality underpinning them. In this sense, according to Michel Foucault, modern
societies can be understood only by reconstructing certain techniques of power,
designed to observe, monitor, shape, discipline, or control the behaviour of
individuals situated within a range of social and economic institutions such as the
school, the factory, the prison, the media, and the church. Foucault (2007)
discerned three inter-related meanings of security: 1) sovereignty confirmed
through the enactment of law on the population within a territory; 2) discipline
consisting of techniques of individualization directed at making individual subjects
docile, conformists and governable; 3) security as an abstraction of the diversity
within a population that can be statistically conceived and managed through the
guidance of the human sciences such as demographics, economics, and
administrative sciences. The key issue here is not the increasing control of the state
over its population, but the shifting emphasis in the ethos and art of governing.
For example, following the Foucaultian perspective, one could trace the shift from
the administrative state of the past shaped by the police and discipline, to one in
which governmental power is dispersed through society by way of professional
power at different sites such as education, health, correction systems, media, and
fear (Truong and Gasper, 2011). Contemporary states are more inclined to use
multiple governmentalities to control and rule the masses. These multiple
governmentalities could range from the processes of securitization of migration
(Doty, 2000; Huysmans, 2006; Walters, 2006; Kaya, 2009) to the growing political
discourse of tolerance (Brown, 2006), or from multiculturalism (Povinelli, 2002) to
Islamophobia. As Miller and Rose (2011: 17) put it very well, governmentalities
change by entering into periods of criticism and crisis, where multiple perceptions of
failure come together, and where alternatives are proposed for the failures of one
mode of governing are opportunities for the formulation of another. The ways in
which multiple forms of governmentality are being performed by the states
demonstrate to us that there are two sides to governmentality. Firstly, the term
refers to a specific form of representation; government defines a discursive field
such as prevention of migration or combating Islamic terrorism in which exercising
power is rationalized. This occurs by the description of concepts, the specification of
objects and borders, the provision of fears, arguments and justifications. In this
manner, government defines a problem to be addressed and offers certain
strategies for handling the problem. And secondly, Foucault uses the term
government in a more general context in the ways in which it was used until the
18th century. Government was a term discussed not only in political tracts, but also
in philosophical, religious, medical and pedagogic texts. This is why, Foucault
defines government as conduct, or, more precisely, as the conduct of conduct and
thus as a term which ranges from governing the self to governing others. In
other words, in his history of governmentality Foucault endeavours to show how the
modern sovereign state and the modern autonomous individual codetermine each
others emergence (Foucault, 1979). Islamophobia as a form of
governmentality is being manufactured in parallel with the growing
stream of ethnicization, racialization and culturalization of what is social
and political in the west since the early 1990s (Brown, 2006). This stream is
advocated by several politicians, public servants, bureaucracy, judiciary, police and

the media in order to hold socio-economically and politically deprived migrants and
their descendants responsible from their isolation, exclusion, poverty,
unemployment, unschooling and any kind of failure in everyday life (Balibar, 2004:
37-38). The process of ethnicizing, racializing and culturalizing what is social and
political is not only shaped by dominant political discourses with a great
conservative tone, but also by the enormous demographic changes, led by the
dissolution of the Eastern Block in late 1980s and early 1990s (Brubaker, 1991; and
Kaya, 2009). The year 1989 signalled the very beginning of a new epoch that
resulted in massive migration flows of ethnic Germans, ethnic Hungarians, ethnic
Russians and Russian Jews from one place to another.24 The post- Communist era
has also brought about a process of re-homogenization in western nation-states like
Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands. Political instability
and ethnic conflicts in the former Eastern Bloc (USSR and former Yugoslavia) on the
other hand pushed some ethnic groups to immigrate to Western European countries
in which they could find ethnic affinities. The mobility of millions of people has
stimulated nation-states to ethnicise their migration policies in a way that approved
the arrival of co-ethnic immigrants, but disapproved the status of existing
immigrants with different ethno-cultural and religious background from that of
majority society. Nation-states were not suitably equipped in the 1990s to absorb
the spontaneous arrival of so many immigrants. This period of demographic change
in Western Europe occurred in parallel with the rise of heterophobic discourses such
as the clash of civilisations, culture wars, religious wars and Islamophobia, as
well as with the reinforcement of restrictive migration policies and territorial border
security vis--vis the nationals of countries outside the European space.

A2 Immigration Ks
Arabs and Muslims are deported unfairly- legislation and court
rulings legalize it
Wing 3 (Adrien Katherine Wing, Civil Rights in the Post 911 World: Critical Race
Praxis, Coalition Building, and the War on Terrorism. 2003. Vol. 63 p. 725-727).
http://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/ lalrev/vol63/iss3/6)//EMerz
"The Supreme Court has upheld immigration laws discriminating against noncitizens
on the basis of race, national origin and political affiliation that would patently
violate the constitution if the rights of citizens were at stake."57 The cases include
Harisiades v. Shaughnessy,Nguyen v. U.S., Reno v American-Arab Anti
Discrimination Committee, Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, Incorporated, and The
Chinese Exclusion cases. The plenary power doctrine has historically provided
immunity from judicial scrutiny of immigration judgments, whether by Congress or
the Executive branch. 3 Many Americans assumed the Oklahoma City bombing of
the Murrah federal building had to be done by Arabs or Muslims, rather than by
white Christian militia member Timothy McVeigh.After that incident, even though
Arabs and Muslims were not involved, draconian immigration laws were passed in
1996 which singled out those groups. Unfortunately, what happened to Arabs and
Muslims under these 1996 laws was not unique. According to Kevin Johnson, these
laws are part of a history of attempts to stifle dissent that includes the Alien and
Sedition Acts of the 1790s and the Palmer Raids after World War. In that period
after the war, the U.S. imprisoned people for years for speaking out against the
war effort. During the cold war Red Scare, many people lost jobs and were
subject to investigation, or were even imprisoned, because of rumored
association with the Communist party. According to Jerry Kang, ''wartime coupled
with racism and intolerance creates particular types of mistakes. Specifically we
overestimate the threat posed by racial 'others,' in WWII, Japanese Americans;
today, Arab Americans, Muslims, Middle Easterners, immigrants and anyone who
looks like 'them."'69 The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996
(AEDPA) made it a crime to contribute to foreign groups deemed as terrorist, and
created special deportation procedures, including the formation of special courts to
evaluate secret evidence.71 The Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility
Act of 1996 (IIRIRA)72 supplemented AEDPA. That act prevents federal courts from
reviewing a variety of immigration cases, with very limited exceptions.73 These two
laws "either explicitly-or according to INS interpretation, impliedly-authorize the use
of classified evidence to exclude an 'alien terrorist' under special removal
proceedings,74 to summarily remove an alien who is a 'national security' risk,7 and
to deny bond to aliens in removal proceedings. "76 Pursuant to these statutes, the
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) deported or attempted to deport more
than two dozen people on the basis of secret evidence-almost all were Muslim,
mainly Arabs.77 Ironically, in 2000, Republican Presidential candidate George W.
Bush accused the Clinton administration of racial profiling when it used secret
evidence.78
After September 11,Muslims and Arabs and people who look like them have been
under siege.87 Over 1000 incidents of hate crimes were reported by February

2002.88 Even President Bush's Arab secret service agent was removed from an
American Airlines plane.89 Of five people who were killed, including a Sikh Indian, a
Pakistani Muslim, an Egyptian Coptic Christian, and an Indian Hindu,90 none of
them was a Muslim Arab, but all were socially constructed as such. The U.S. Justice
Department opened up more than 380 investigations into violence or threats, which
have taken the form of "telephone, internet, mail and face-to-face threats; minor
assaults, assaults with dangerous weapons, and assaults resulting in serious injury
or death; and vandalism, shootings, and bombings directed at homes, businesses,
and places of worship."91 About 70 state and local criminal prosecutions were
instigated against 80 defendants.92 According to Bill Hing, Arabs and Muslims,
whether citizens or not, are literally and figuratively being de-Americanized, which is
"a twisted brand of xenophobia that is not simply hatred of foreigners, but also
hatred of those who may not be foreigners but whom the vigilantes would prefer
being removed from the country anyway."93 A member of the U.S. Civil Rights
Commission has even said that in the event of another terrorist attack, the
American government might consider interning Arab Americans,94 reminiscent of
the treatment of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans in World War 11.95 The
legal position of Arabs and Muslims has especially declined since the exceptionally
speedy passage of the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate
Tools Required to Mapping Muslims: p.3

A2 Law Ks
The aff is a corrective to the failures of legal liberalism
focusing on the role of national security discourse in racial
subordination moves beyond the law vs. security framing and
addresses the socially contingent nature of the lawwe
Gott 5, Professor of International Studies
[01/01/05, Gil Gott is a Professor of International Studies at DePaul University, The
Devil We Know: Racial Subordination and National Security Law Villanova Law
Review, Vol. 50, Iss. 4, p. 1075-1076,
http://digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1235&context=vlr]

This article asks the "subordination question" with regard to contemporary national
security law and policy.2 It will consider how our scholarship and institutions
construct national security law and policy in ways that afford either greater or lesser
degrees of analytical and normative primacy to the problems of racialized group-based
social harms that commonly surround exercises of national security-related powers . The
anti-subordinationist methodology deployed here foregrounds such problems and allows
us more accurately to assess the real costs of "states of emergency" by moving
beyond standard law-versus-security framings. By focusing on "enemy group"
demonization we are also better able to grasp the identity-inflected basis of
the constructed security horizon itself, in effect analytically opening up to
contestation the statist "black box" of emergency construction . Finally, the normative
pre-commitments of an anti-subordinationist perspective allow us to judge the
merits and the desirability of national secur-ity law and policy from a perspective
that resists resolving the law-security binarism into unrestrained political
decisionism.3 Given an abundance of historical and contemporary evidence
that national security rationales and measures are socially contingent in both
conception and effect (reflecting at the bottom, societal pathologies such as racial
and ethnic animus), it would seem likely that mainstream legal scholars would treat
the resulting group-based harms as central to the post-September 11 national security
law and policy debates. Indeed, the research I present in this article shows that it is not the case
that liberal legal sensibilities wholly fail to apprehend the problems of group
demonization in security crises. Legal liberalism, in fact, evinces due concern for
state abuse of emergency powers and acknowledges the "distributional" inequalities
inherent in such abusive practices, that is, the disproportionate burdening of "outgroups" in state security crises. The legal literature, however, typically orients itself
around the narrow problem of how best to balance the conflicting
demands of law-usually conceived of as minimalized individual civil liberties
protections and/or institutional balancingand state security. I will show that legal
liberalism has not effectively confronted the devil we know all too well- the
subordination of racialized enemy groups, in this case, Arabs, Muslims or South
Asians. I look at two categories of post-September 11 liberal and progressive legal responses,

accommodationist approaches 4 and more oppositional, albeit formalistic, civil libertiesbased critiques. The first group of approaches seeks generally to accommodate law and justice to
national security- related "necessity" and is animated in part by valorization and
even identification with the state and its putative security needs . Alternatively, the
formalistic civil liberties approaches would generally apply the Constitution in more or less
the same way regardless of the state's perceived security dilemma. This "business
as usual" approach distrusts hypertrophied governmental powers and uses civil
liberties framings to critique security regimes, such as the one arising from the war on terrorism. 5
While I consider the work of civil liberties advocates to be courageous and crucial for the broader project of creating

I will consider how both accommodationist and

formalistic civil liberties approaches similarly may occlude key subordinationist
dimensions of the war on terrorism. Anti-subordinationist principles require
taking more complete account of how enemy groups are racialized , and
how they come to be constructed as outsiders and the kinds of harms that
may befall them as such. Group-based status harms include those that have been inscribed in law and
a more just national security culture,

effectuated through state action, and those that arise within civil society, through social structures, institutions,

Familiarity with the processes of racialization is a necessary

precondition for appreciating and remedying such injuries. Applying antisubordinationist thinking to national security law and policy does not require
arguing that only race-based effects matter, but does require affording significant
analytical and normative weight to the problems of such status harms . Racial
injuries require racial remedies. Foregrounding anti-subordinationist principles in
national security law and policy analysis departs significantly from traditional
approaches in the field. Nonetheless, arguments based in history, political theory and pragmatism suggest
that such a fundamental departure is warranted. Historically, emergency-induced "states of
exception" 6 that have suspended legal protections against governmental abuses
have tended to be identity based in conception and implementation. 7 Viewed
from the perspective of critical political theory, the constellation of current "security
threats" rests on the epochal co-production of identity-based and marketdriven global political antagonisms, referred to somewhat obliquely as
civilization clashes or perhaps more forthrightly as American imperialism .
Pragmatically, it makes no sense to fight terrorism by alienating millions of Muslim,
Arab and South Asian residents in the United States and hundreds of millions more
abroad through abusive treatment and double standards operative in identity-based
repression at home and in selective, preemptive U.S. militarism abroad . Such double
standards undermine the democratic legitimacy of the United States both in its
internal affairs and in its assertions of global leadership . Indeed, there seems to be no shortage
culture and habitus.

of perspectives from which liberal legal institutions would be enjoined from embracing a philosophy of political
decisionism precisely at the interface of law and security, an anomic frontier along which are likely to arise identitybased regimes of exception and evolving race-based forms of subordination.

A2 Rights Ks
Human rights are a prerequisite to other weighing
mechanisms- their inalienable nature means that they should
come first
Donnelly 82. (Jack Donnelly. Professor at MIT. Human rights and human dignity:
An analytic critique of non-Western conceptions of human rights.
www.academia.edu/3122860/Human _rights_and
_human_dignity_An_analytic_critique_of_nonWestern_conceptions_of_human_rights)//EMerz
Human rights are conceived as naturally inhering in the human person. They
are neither granted by the state nor are they the result of one's actions. In
Hart's (1955) well-known categorization, they are general rights, rights that
arise from no special undertaking beyond membership in the human race. To
have human rights one does not have to be anything other than a human
being. Neither must one do anything other than be born a human being. Since they
are grounded in human nature, human rights are generally viewed as inalienable,
at least in the way in which one's nature is inalienable. Inalienability is a
particularly difficult concept to analyze. However, at the minimum what is
suggested is that in some moral sense one cannot fully renounce, transfer, or
otherwise alienate one's human rights. To do so would be to destroy one's
humanity, to de-nature oneself, to become other (less) than a human being and
thus it is viewed as a moral impossibility.