Scapegoats by Arsalan Iftikhar

Author:Arsalan Iftikhar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hot Books
Published: 2016-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

When Islamophobia Wears a Badge

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Though you might not know it from watching television, I can promise you that Muslims do not have a monopoly on terrorism. In fact, according to a 2015 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a domestic terrorist attack occurs (or is foiled) every thirty-four days in America. As the SPLC report concluded, “Muslim terrorists [only] accounted for a fraction of the total attacks” in America.

In the twelve years between 9/11 and 2013, more than three hundred Americans were killed on domestic soil by political violence or mass shootings—but only thirty-three of these fatalities were caused by extremists who were Muslim. Furthermore, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center report, the white supremacist terrorist Dylann Roof killed more human beings in one night alone in that historic South Carolina black church—nine defenseless people—than “Islamic terrorists have killed on US soil in total between 2011 and 2014.”

In October 2014, I went on Don Lemon’s prime-time CNN show—this was a few months before the Do You Support ISIS? interview heard around the world. On this occasion, I challenged Lemon’s previous guest—former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, who has tried to hang onto the political spotlight by turning himself into a slayer of the Muslim bogeyman. I quoted CNN’s own counterterrorism expert, Peter Bergen, who has written that “right-wing extremists in America have actually caused more damage and killed more Americans than jihadists have” in recent years. “You have more of a likelihood to die from drowning in your bathtub and getting struck by lightning than you do being killed by a jihadist,” I told CNN viewers that day.

Despite the fact that white, right-wing extremists pose far more of a violent threat to Americans than jihadist radicals, US law enforcement authorities who monitor militant activity have turned American Muslims into their top target, simply on the basis of our religion. Long before 9/11, Muslims in the US were seen as a “model minority”—patriotic, hard-working, and family-oriented. But after years of media hysteria and political opportunism, Muslims are now seen as American pariahs, more reviled than any other group in our society. And law enforcement policies only reinforce this negative profiling. One of the worst offenders when it comes to anti-Muslim bias is the New York Police Department (NYPD).

Associated Press (AP) reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for revealing that since 9/11, the NYPD had become one of “the country’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies” and had consistently (and unconstitutionally) spied on the American Muslim community throughout the New York City metropolitan area for over a decade.

Using leaked internal NYPD documents, the AP reporters proved that the NYPD had used millions of taxpayer dollars to create an elaborate surveillance program that monitored and analyzed American Muslim daily life throughout New York City and surrounding states as well. The series of Pulitzer Prize–winning articles also revealed that the NYPD operated far outside of its own jurisdictional boundaries, targeting ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties laws if they were practiced by the federal government.

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