One of the problems is that “Muslims” had not been considered an ethnic group, and the main law enforcement tool against hate crimes is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It says, “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

This language is problematic not only for Muslims but also Jewish Americans. Where you have a white American of Jewish faith, does that person fall under Title VI? It doesn’t say anything about religious groups.

So it is huge, enormous news that the Biden administration has issued an interpretation of Title VI that underlines its applicability not only to Jews but also to Muslim Americans and Sikh Americans. Jewish Americans are the most frequent victims of hate crimes among religious groups in the US, and antisemitic tropes such as that George Soros controls the country are routinely repeated by American politicians. But Muslims and Sikhs also feel the lash of such bigotry.

Eight key federal government departments joined this initiative, including the Department of the Interior. Interior issued a statement saying that “Today, the U.S. Department of the Interior joined seven other agencies across the federal government to clarify for the first time in writing that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits certain forms of antisemitism, Islamophobia and related discrimination. Today’s announcement is the latest step of the implementation of the Biden-Harris administration’s historic U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, released in May 2023.”

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, herself a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, remarked of this historic initiative, “Every person in this country should have access to the resources that the federal government provides. Today, the Biden-Harris administration is leading by example and making it crystal clear that antisemitism, Islamophobia and related forms of discrimination have no place in America. Interior is committed to living up to our values as a country and enforcing these important civil rights protections.”

The change is a vindication of thinkers such as Sahar Aziz, who argued in her The Racial Muslim that Muslim Americans have been discriminated against because they were treated not as members of a religion with first amendment rights but as an unprotected ethnic group that could be surveilled and discriminated against with impunity.

Muslim Americans had not been involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks — they were carried out by a small cult of fanatics based in Afghanistan. The some 4 million Americans are famously law-abiding and most often are the pillars of their communities, being physicians, professors, scientists, attorneys, and business people. Trump’s head of Operation Warp Speed, a public-private collaboration that produced the Moderna vaccine against COVID-19, was a Moroccan-American Muslim, Monçef Slaoui.

Muslim Americans have been treated as pariahs by many local, state and federal authorities and have widely had their constitutional rights infringed. Their mosques have been subject to arson attacks, veiled women have been attacked, and some white nationalist groups have subjected them to hate speech.

We had the campaign against a New York Muslim community center to be built several blocks away from the World Trade Center, which opponents called the “ground zero mosque.” We had a political campaign against a mosque expansion in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in which white Christian city council members openly speculated that their Muslim fellow residents might use it as an opportunity to plot out murders.

We had an NYPD surveillance program targeting Muslim Americans. It was only one such surveillance project– Muslim Americans widely had their fourth amendment rights infringed on by security and law enforcement agencies.

Even then Rep. Peter King of New York, who is an open supporter of the Irish Republican Army who defended its violence as “legitimate,” dared come out and hold hearings on the terrorism danger allegedly emanating from Muslim Americans.

We had a rash of unconstitutional “shariah bans,” mainly in Republican-ruled states, which tried to forbid law-making on the basis of Muslim law. There is no reason to think that the 35,000 Muslims and Arabs of Oklahoma want to have the state legislature adopt shariah, which is analogous to the Jewish halakha, the religious law by which believers regulate their lives. Nor is there any reason to think that they could succeed even if they did want this, which they do not.

Moreover, the measures were nonsense. Since US law is in the British common law tradition, actually precedents can be cited from anywhere and a Muslim or Jewish or Catholic law that became customary in an American community would certainly lend itself to citation in court cases. Muslim Americans who make contracts, including marriage contracts, on the basis of Muslim law or shariah, can have US courts enforce them.

Wherever the shariah bans were challenged in court, as in Oklahoma, they were struck down as unconstitutional, and surely the legislators who passed them knew that they would be. They were just grandstanding, and trying for Evangelical votes. Ironically, Evangelical Christians themselves often wish to erode the wall between church and state in the US, but only in favor of Christian law. The Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade was the imposition of Catholic and Evangelical Christian shariah on Americans, which is apparently all right.

President Biden has put the enormous power and influence of the federal government behind a new push to ensure that Muslim Americans have their full constitutional rights. After all, if they are going to be de facto racialized and treated as a “dangerous” ethnic group by many whites, then they should have Title VI protections against discrimination on grounds of heritage.

While US and other western media have called out Russian aggression without pause or equivocal language, coverage of Amnesty International’s critical report on Israeli apartheid was quite different. The New York Timeswent so far as to blackout coverage of the report altogether. This discrepancy helps illustrate how the mainstream news media in the US has at times served specific political agendas and parroted official talking points.

The problem is not that a so-called “paper of record” would entirely ignore such a major news story, but rather how the media often frames the narratives around these stories. The use of different words and language for violations of international law carried out by different state actors demonstrates the double standards often employed by US officials and mimicked by reporters.

This inequitable treatment, as we have recently witnessed first hand with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is also evident in the racialized manner in which geopolitical events are reported to the public. As coverage of the Ukrainian people acting in self-defense is lauded and even armed resistance is sanctioned with reports on making molotov cocktails, non-white peoples and resistance toward invading and occupying forces — such as Iraqis against the US invasion or Palestinians resisting Israeli occupation — are depicted as less “civilized” and labeled “terrorists.” This appalling double standard is commonplace in both US foreign policy and the way it is presented by the media.

CONTRASTING STANDARDS

In dealing with reporting on Israel, US mainstream media often uses language that diminishes violations of international law or even misrepresents the facts on the ground, such as CNN referring to indigenous Palestinians in Jerusalem as “settlers” in their ancestral homeland. Such a deliberate “error” is particularly egregious given the continued expansion of unlawful Israeli settlements on Palestinian land and the increasing violence Palestinians are subjected to by Israeli settlers.

The way settler violence itself is framed often softens the explicit and abhorrent racism at its roots, calling these hateful attacks against Palestinians, “nationalistically motivated.” While US discourse on Russia’s actions in Ukraine are couched in terms of sovereignty and a global rules-based order, major US news outlets refer to territory illegally occupied by Israel — as recognized by the very same international law that is cited against Russia — as “war-won lands.”

Similar biases are repeated within other areas of US foreign policy and carry major consequences. Let us not forget the fact that the Bush administration’s lies, which misled the American public leading up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, were largely echoed by the American press and played a crucial role in manufacturing consent for that disastrous war.

On Iran, US mainstream media has often inflated the idea of Iran as a “threat,” reiterating the rhetoric of US officials. For instance, the idea that Iran is “on the verge” of a nuclear weapon has been repeated for decades. As hawks in Washington try to sabotage ongoing diplomatic negotiations with Iran, mainstream outlets continue to run pieces that encourage military strikes against Iran. Worse yet, pieces are published that present blatantly false or misleading information, like claims that Iran already has nuclear weapons or is weeks away from a weapon.

As a central source of information for the American public, the way our news media presents evidence influences public views. Unfortunately, those views appear to be slanted and misinformed. This is evident in American responses to a 2021 Brookings Institute survey that showed 60.5% of respondents falsely believed Iran possesses nuclear weapons — which it does not — while only 51.7% believed Israel possesses them, when it possesses an arsenal of nuclear weapons. It is hard to blame the public for being misinformed when our institutions do such a poor job of presenting unbiased information.

These attitudes have often spilled over into U.S. domestic politics, so that Iranian-Americans have been targeted as objects of hate. See the important recent study by the National Iranian American Council, “Othering Iran: How Dehumanization of Iranians Undermines Rights at Home.” The report observes that demonization of Iranian-Americans has led to, “the discriminatory closures of Iranian-American bank accounts, the freezing of transactional accounts simply for using words like “Iran” or “Persian,” immigration policies that prevent family members from Iran to visit their Iranian-American family, discriminatory questions when entering the United States as a U.S. person, and an overall sense of hostility that has been experienced in numerous ways.”

Othering Iran: How Dehumanization of Iranians Undermines Rights at Home [Click for Report].

If the lessons of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan teach us anything, it is the waste and futility of US militarism and the need for accurate intel and assessments. Integral to this is the role of journalists and news media. Yet, recent exchanges between US State Department officials and reporters made headlines precisely because fair pushback and asking the US government for evidence of their claims is such a rare occurrence. That US officials seemed to be caught off guard by this line of questioning is also indicative of a longtime acquiescence on the part of reporters to simply take the government at its word.

A PUBLIC CALL TO DUTY

While such information is often presented to the public as facts, mainstream media and American journalists must not fail to contest them and raise difficult questions. At the same time, the media itself often displays hawkish leanings and reserves its strongest critiques for diplomatic efforts. However, one of the more important jobs of reporters is to be objective and even-handed, rather than politicize the news. As such, journalists should challenge the hypocrisy of US actions versus its political discourse. Pointing out when the US and its allies are not held to the same standards as the countries we condemn is not an act of treason, it is the pursuit of truth and knowledge.

There is also the role of the American public. When a major newspaper such as The New York Times fails to report crimes against humanity, there should be a communal uproar. When the proponents of failed wars continue to promote new wars, they should face public backlash. When the mainstream media treats political actions and acts of self-defense differently based on the racial, religious, and ethnic backgrounds of the actors, we must not stay silent. As Americans, we must not only hold our government accountable for its actions, but we must also hold the institutions that inform the public accountable for the responsibilities they have been entrusted to uphold.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson excused one of the leaders of the extremist Oath Keepers organization implicated in the January 6th insurrection by describing him as “a devout Christian.” It’s safe to surmise that he wouldn’t have offered a similar defense for a Muslim American. Since September 11th, and even before that ominous date, they have suffered bitterly from discrimination and hate crimes in this country, while their religion has been demonized. During the first year of the Trump administration, about half of Muslim Americans polled said that they had personally experienced some type of discrimination.

No matter that this group resides comfortably in the American mainstream, it remains under intensive, often unconstitutional, surveillance. In contrast, during the past two decades, the Department of Justice for the most part gave a pass to violent white supremacists. No matter that they generated more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil than any other group. The benign insouciance of the white American elite toward such dangerous fanatics also allowed them to organize freely for the January 6th assault on the Capitol and the potential violent overthrow of the government.

Donell Harvin was the chief of homeland security and intelligence for the government of the District of Columbia in the period leading up to January 6th. He assured NBC News’s Ken Dilanian that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security seemed completely oblivious about the plans of white supremacist hate groups to violently halt the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory, despite plentiful evidence on social media that they were preparing to bring weaponry to the Capitol.

Consider now the treatment that the very same agencies offered distinctly inoffensive Muslim Americans. Rutgers law professor Sahar Aziz has argued that many white Americans see Muslims not merely as a religious group but as a racial one and have placed them on the nethermost rung of this country’s ethnic hierarchy. Muslim Americans are regularly, for instance, profiled at airports and subjected to long interrogations. Over many years, the New York City Police Department gathered intelligence on more than 250 mosques and student groups. The FBI even put field officers in mosques not only to spy on, but also to entrap worshipers who, alarmed by their wild talk, sometimes reported them to… the FBI.

Aziz notes that Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 to register all Muslim Americans in a database, institute widespread surveillance of mosques, and possibly exclude Muslims from the country. Even non-governmental far-right groups like discredited ex-journalist Steve Emerson’s “Investigative Project on Terrorism” have spied on Muslim Americans. As with everything else in the contemporary U.S., a partisan divide has emerged regarding them, with 72% of Republicans holding the self-evidently false belief that Muslims are more likely to commit violence than adherents of other faiths, while only 32% of Democrats say this.

Apparently, though, our concern over the potential commission of violence in this country should actually focus on Republicans. A recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found that 34% of Americans now believe that violence against the government is sometimes justified, a statistic that rises to an alarming 40% among Republicans. In other words, this country’s worries about violence should be focused most on the right-wing extremist fringe, exemplified by groups like the Oath Keepers, 11 of whose leaders were arrested by the FBI in mid-January for “seditious conspiracy” in their paramilitary invasion of the Capitol in 2021. More people have perished in political killings in the past 20 years here at the hands of far-right radicals than those of any other group, including extremists of Muslim heritage. Still, this country’s security agencies continue their laser focus on monitoring Muslim Americans, even as they grossly underestimate the threat from white supremacists.

Collectively Punishing Muslim Americans

What most characterizes the American Muslim community, which at nearly four million strong makes up more than 1% of the population, is diversity. It includes white and Hispanic converts, African Americans, Arab Americans, and South-Asian Americans whose families hailed from the Indian subcontinent. Three American Muslims are serving in Congress and even President Trump appointed a Moroccan-born American immunologist, Moncef Slaoui, to head Operation Warp Speed that produced the Moderna vaccine for Covid-19. Last summer saw the confirmation of the first Muslim-American federal judge and President Biden has just nominated the first Muslim-American woman to the federal bench. There are also striking numbers of Muslim-American peace activists, either with their own organizations or involved at interfaith centers, as well as many environmentalists and community organizers, but the media and academics seldom focus on this dimension of the religion.

Buy the Book

In my new book, Peace Movements in Islam, my colleagues and I did something remarkably rare in these years: we explored this peaceful dimension of the faith of a fifth of humankind. We focused, for instance, on the Muslims active alongside Mahatma Gandhi in nonviolent noncooperation to end British colonial domination of India. Closer to home, contributor Grace Yukich explores the Muslim-American reaction to the rise of the virulently Islamophobic Trump administration and finds that many responded by promoting the progressive dimensions of their faith, while working against racism and for the rights of immigrants and the poor.

Polling supports her findings, with 69% of Muslim-American respondents saying that working for justice forms an essential part of their identity, nearly the same as the 72% who say that loving the Prophet Muhammad is essential to being a Muslim. In addition, 62% see protecting the natural environment as a key to Muslim identity. The majority of them, in other words, are religiously open-minded. Some 56% of Muslim Americans, for instance, believe that other religions can be a path to salvation. In contrast, only a third of evangelical Christians take a similar position when it comes to religions outside the Judeo-Christian tradition.

And here’s a seldom-recognized reality in this country: Muslims form a longstanding and important thread in the American tapestry, having been in North America for centuries. Rabbinical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all arose on the fringes of the Roman Empire between the first and seventh centuries of the common era. All believe in the one God of Abraham, as well as in the biblical patriarchs and prophets. All forbid murder, robbery, and other violent crimes. There are no objective grounds for a United States that recognizes the first two to deny legitimacy to the third.

Muslim-American numbers have increased dramatically since, in 1965, Congress changed formerly racist immigration laws to abolish country quotas that favored northern Europeans. Some 75% of the Muslim Americans here are now citizens. The 9/11 attacks, however, turbocharged hatred of this group, unfairly associating them in the minds of many Americans with violence and terrorism, even though all the hijackers were foreigners and differed starkly in their political and ethnic backgrounds from those of most Muslim Americans. Unlike whites, who suffer no reputational damage from being of the same race as violent white supremacists, Muslim Americans have been collectively punished for bad behavior by any of them or even by foreign coreligionists. While a small number of Muslim Americans have succumbed to the blandishments of radical Muslim ideologies, it has been vigorously rejected by all but a few.

The same cannot be said of white nationalists for whom radicalism stands at the core of their identity, while a disturbing strain of poisonous racism runs through their activities. The 11 leaders of the Oath Keepers arrested in mid-January for seditious conspiracy had stockpiled heavy weapons and coordinated with rapid-response teams pre-positioned outside Washington, D.C., whom they hoped to call on, apparently after they invaded the halls of Congress. According to the indictment, the leader of that 5,000-strong organization, Elmer “Stewart” Rhodes, wrote on its website on December 23, 2020, “Tens of thousands of patriot Americans, both veterans and non-veterans, will already be in Washington, D.C., and many of us will have our mission-critical gear stowed nearby, just outside D.C.”

Rhodes, who spent thousands of dollars on weaponry in December and January, said in an open letter that he and others may have to “take to arms in defense of our God given liberty.” Oath Keeper chapters around the country conducted military training exercises with rifles. Indicted Alabaman Oath Keeper Joshua James, 33, texted on the Signal messaging app, “We have a shitload of QRF [Quick Reaction Forces] on standby with an arsenal.” They were concerned, though, that during the planned civil disturbance, authorities could close the bridges from Virginia (where they had holed up in motels with their assault rifles) into D.C. A QRF team leader from North Carolina wrote, “My sources DC working on procuring Boat transportation as we speak.” Kelly Meggs of Florida, another Oath Keeper leader, sent messages worrying about running out of ammunition: “Ammo situation. I am checking on as far as what they will have for us if SHTF [the shit hits the fan]. I’m gonna have a few thousand just in case. If you’ve got it doesn’t hurt to have it. No one ever said shit I brought too much.”

On the morning of January 6th, one of the organization’s leaders, 63-year-old Edward Vallejo of Phoenix, Arizona, discussed the possibility of “armed conflict” and “guerrilla war” on a podcast. On the day itself, members of the Oath Keepers formed paramilitary “stacks” in front of the Capitol to invade it in formation. They were, however, foiled when some Capitol police delayed them by holding the line against thousands of angry, determined fanatics, while others whisked most members of Congress away to secure locations inaccessible to the mob. Before they were rescued, some representatives lay on the floor, weeping or praying. In other words, the American far right came much closer to overthrowing the U.S. government than al-Qaeda ever did and, at the same time, resembles al-Qaeda far more than Republican lawmakers are ever likely to admit.

Ignoring White Nationalists

The Oath Keepers, like the Boogaloo Bois and other far-right groups central to the insurrection, do not so much have an ideology as a mental cesspool of conspiracy theories and imaginary grievances. Typically, in December 2018, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes spoke of asylum-seekers at the border with Mexico as a “military invasion” by “cartels” and part of a “political coup” by the domestic Marxist left. He also managed to blame Muslims and the late Senator John McCain for provoking crises that would leave this country’s borders “undefended.”

Extremists on the white nationalist right have been a known quantity to American law enforcement for decades and have committed horrific acts of violence like Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 truck-bombing of the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people and wounded more than 800. Unlike Muslim Americans, however, they have been cut remarkable slack.

The Republican Party has had a longstanding and chillingly effective policy of downplaying the dangers of extremist white nationalists. No surprise there, since the GOP depends on the far-right vote in elections and on financial contributions from well-off white supremacists who hate the multiracial Democrats. In 2009, analyst Daryl Johnson of the Department of Homeland Security in the newly installed Obama administration produced a confidential report for law enforcement suggesting that right-wing extremism posed the biggest domestic threat of terrorism to this country. Republicans in Congress leaked it and then, along with right-wing media like Fox News, went ballistic.

House minority leader John Boehner (R-OH) said at the time:

“[T]he Secretary of Homeland Security owes the American people an explanation for why she has abandoned using the term ‘terrorist’ to describe those, such as al-Qaeda, who are plotting overseas to kill innocent Americans, while her own Department is using the same term to describe American citizens who disagree with the direction Washington Democrats are taking our nation.”

According to Johnson, the Obama administration caved to this campaign:

“Work related to violent right-wing extremism was halted. Law enforcement training also stopped. My unit was disbanded. And, one-by-one, my team of analysts left for other employment. By 2010, there were no intelligence analysts at DHS working domestic terrorism threats.”

One can imagine that under Trump such groups received even less government scrutiny, since one of their fellow travelers had ascended to the White House.

The refusal of the Washington establishment to take the menace of far-right white nationalist movements seriously has been among the biggest security failures in this country’s history. The collusion of mainstream Republicans who have, in essence, run interference for such dangerous, well-armed conspiracy theorists has stained the party of Lincoln indelibly, while the participation of active-duty military and police personnel in these groups poses a dire threat to the Republic.

At the same time, this country’s security agencies failed epically in their treatment of Muslim Americans after the 9/11 attacks by infringing on their civil liberties, while abridging or disregarding constitutional protections for millions of innocent people. Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, points to congressional reports that question the value of all this monitoring of an American minority, not to speak of the absurdities it has entailed. As she put it, “Often, the reports singled out Muslims engaged in normal activities for suspicion: a [Department of Homeland Security] officer flagged as suspicious a seminar on marriage held at a mosque, while a north Texas fusion center advised keeping an eye out for Muslim civil liberties groups and sympathetic individuals and organizations.” In such a world, even Muslim Americans active in peace centers become inherently suspicious, but heavily armed white nationalists in motels just outside Washington aren’t.

Copyright 2022 Juan Cole

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Via Tomdispatch.com

Joe Biden pledged to end the ban on “Day one” of his presidency.

Trump’s travel ban deeply wounded American lives. Grandparents could not come over for weddings, grandchildren could not see a seriously ill loved one. The supposed rationale was that people from those countries were dangerous to US security. But Apple’s Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian immigrant, and Iranian-American entrepreneur Dara Khosrowshahi is the CEO of Uber. Trump just wanted to find a legal way of excluding Muslims, which contravenes the First Amendment. So Rudy Giuliani, when he was still half-lucid, admitted he told Trump to associate the Muslim visa ban with “danger.” The countries excluded were often in turmoil, though some of the turmoil was because, you know, of American interventions. Others, like Iran, were not tumultuous in the least. It was just religious prejudice dressed up as immigration policy.

Trump is also a notorious bigot against people of color. Former employees have revealed that decades ago when he used to come out to inspect his casinos, strict instructions were given that he should see no Black people. Nick Paumgarten at the New Yorker reported of an African-American, Kip Brown:

‘Brown also used to work in the casinos, at the Showboat, bussing tables, and at Trump’s Castle, stripping and waxing floors. “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” he said. “It was the eighties, I was a teen-ager, but I remember it: they put us all in the back.” ‘

What a delicious irony it is, then, that Joe Biden maintained the Blue Wall of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin with the crucial help of the Muslim-American and African-American votes.

CNN exit polls found that 91% of Biden voters in Michigan listed racial inequality as their main issue. That concern was topped only by the pandemic.

Trump has investments in Istanbul and was considering the United Arab Emirates, and he performed the Sword Dance with Saudis, and his white supremacist posturing was just intended to get him the latent white supremacist vote. Trump’s flawed political genius was to recognize that the latter was much more huge than the rest of the Republican Party realized. Some GOP figures had used dog whistles pretty extensively to add the white nationalists to their constituencies, but at least after the national mood changed with the victory of the Civil Rights movement, they mostly did not dare be explicit. Trump tested whether you could win by openly playing to the white nationalists

Elisse Ramey of ABC 12 reports that Biden won Michigan by 150,000 votes. He is estimated to have gotten at least 81,000 early and absentee votes from Muslims in southeast Michigan (many of them live in Dearborn). The total Muslim vote in the state isn’t known. Muslim American volunteers manned the phones and got out the vote in unprecedented numbers.

A poll by the Council on American Islamic Relations indicated that 71% of Muslim Americans planned to vote for Biden. There are roughly 3.5 million Muslim Americans, about 1% of the population. They predominate, however, in the swing states. Given that Michigan is often split 50/50 between Democrats and Republicans, Muslim Americans have sometimes been a crucial swing state.

About a fifth of Muslim Americans are from Black American convert families. In Michigan, Hamtramck has a big Bangladeshi population, from South Asia. A substantial group are the Arab Americans, who have congregated in Dearborn, MI. Not all Arab-Americans, however, are Muslims. There are an estimated 400,000 Arab Americans in southeast Michigan, but the state’s Muslim population is estimated at roughly 275,000. Michigan has slightly less than 10 million residents.

Muslim Americans make up 15% of Michigan’s physicians, 10 percent of pharmacists (both front line workers during the pandemic) and their consumer spending in the state amounts to $5.5 billion. They give generously to charity. As Michael Jackman observed, they are the opposite of Trump’s image of them, being warm, munificent and disproportionately in the helping professions.

As for Michigan’s African-Americans, Wayne County, where they are 42%, saw a 10 percent surge in voter turnout between 2016 and 2020. African-American activists played a key role in getting the vote out. Detroit Action “His group contacted 20,000 first-time voters and made 1.2 million calls across the state” according to Emily Lawler and Malachi Barrett of Mlive. Biden and Kamala Harris made numerous campaign stops in Detroit, even till the end of the campaign, stressing how important it was to them. African-American turnout was energized by the string of police brutality cases in 2020 that roiled the nation, and which inflicted deep wounds on the psyches of minorities.

In the end, Trump bet that you could win with a largely white constituency. But the country’s demographics are rapidly changing. Non-Hispanic whites are now only 61% of the US population, and no, Donald, they aren’t all bigots. In fact, urban and suburban whites swung big to Biden-Harris. Some 80% of married white Protestant women used to reliably vote Republican. Trump whittled it down to 51% with his misogyny. In the past 25 years evangelicals have plummeted from about a quarter of the population to only 17%. Trump never bothered to expand his base beyond the white nationalists and the hard core Republicans. They just aren’t a majority, and will be less of one in 2024. Trump is the past, not the future.

—–

Bonus Video:

VOA News from just before the election: “Huge Voter Turnout Expected in US Muslim Communities for Presidential Election”

Redfield is an eminent virologist with a doctorate of medicine from Georgetown University School of Medicine. Trump cheated on his SAT’s, paying someone to take them for him.

Masks are estimated to reduce transmission by 80%. Vaccines may be only 60% to 70% effective. I think we may conclude that Dr. Redfield has the better of this argument.

Having crashed the US economy and having polished off tens of thousands of Americans with his irrational policies based on magical thinking, Trump is now coming for American history.

Trump wants history to be taught as a celebration of the United States and its achievements, and wants it taught in such a way as to erase the achievements of popular movements, including unions and civil rights organizations. He singled out for condemnation Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Given that well over half of Americans can’t stand the sight of Donald Trump, his condemnation of Zinn’s work will certainly shoot it into the ranks of best-sellerdom. Couldn’t someone please tell Trump how pernicious my own books are and have him publicly denounce them? I’m sure he hates Napoleon’s Egypt, for instance, or The New Arabs, or Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires.

Professional historians are not interested in history as a celebration of anything. They are perfectly happy to praise a remarkable achievement where there has been one, mind you. But academic history is not about praise or blame or making people feel good about their national identity. Historians construct narratives of the past, and if people want to feel good about those narratives, there is nothing wrong with that. But it isn’t what the historians are going for.

What excites historians is explanation. Why did something happen when it did? Thousands of books have been written about the French Revolution, trying to explain why it unfolded as it did. Once you get hooked on a question like that, and if you are dissatisfied with the prevailing theories, you can’t rest until you get to the bottom of it. Historians are the kind of people who can’t understand how anyone could get bored, or want to commit suicide. The archives are there, the documents are available, but so many historical puzzles haven’t begun to be solved, and trying to solve them is fun and can give meaning to life. There are only about 12,000 members of the American Historical Association, mostly college professors. A decade ago there were 57,200 high school history teachers. We have 330 million Americans, so I conclude that not very many Americans pursue history as a profession. I personally think we’d all be much better off if there were more.

Historians attend to change over time, causality, context, complexity, and contingency.

We can illustrate these principles briefly with reference to Thomas Jefferson and slavery. Jefferson’s slave-owning had a context in the history of European slavery and in the trans-Atlantic trade in African slaves. His own ambivalence about the institution derived from Enlightenment ideals about human equality. He admitted that he ought to have freed his slaves. So why did he decline to manumit his slaves? Well, his Virginia estates were terrible farmland, and he tried to grow tobacco on them, which depletes the soil. They were so bad that he could barely stay in business. He instead setting up a manufactury for nails on his land, which he admitted only prospered because of the labor of his Black slave boys, who were beaten by the overseer. He was convinced that if he let his slaves go, he would go bankrupt. This is no excuse. He was untrue to his own ideals. So what if he couldn’t be a British-style gentleman? But in order to understand his moral failure, we have to understand his economic and social context. Contingency comes in here. What if Jefferson had been more entrepreneurial, and more principled, like ex-slave owner Ben Franklin? Or more principled, like George Washington, who did free his slaves? To be fair, only relatively late in life did Franklin take an anti-slavery stand. Or what if Jefferson had been rich and felt he could afford to pay farm hands instead of exploiting the labor of people he tried to own like property? Complexity means not analyzing Jefferson only with regard to his contributions to religious freedom or to the Declaration of Independence or indirectly (he was in France) to the Constitution. It means seeing him as a part of the “gentleman” class. One of his grievances against the British is that they did not view colonists like himself as equal gentlemen to those in Britain. Remaining a landed gentleman was so important to him that he betrayed his belief, expressed in the 1780s, that slaves should be freed. It means seeing him as a slave-owner who raped his slave Sally Hemings. I say raped because a slave cannot refuse sexual advances and the power dynamics of master-slave sex are always predatory. Note that Sally was the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, Martha. Complexity also implies a willingness to bring in a wide array of evidence. In this case, DNA studies prove that Jefferson had children with his slave, Sally Hemings.

And all of these tools allow us to pivot away from Jefferson. What if we instead wrote the biography of Sally Hemings, and told the history through her eyes and that of her six children by Jefferson? What if we traced her ancestry back to, say, Senegalese Muslims? I’m not saying we can, though DNA studies could help with the Senegal part. Would that make American history look different?

Actually, I would add to change over time, causality, context, complexity, and contingency, comparison and contrast as a key tool for historians. Comparing Jefferson, above, to Washington and Franklin and Sally Hemings seems to me to add something to the story. My friend Raymond Grew, who promoted comparative history, just died, so I’m making this point in his memory.

Historians apply these ways of thinking to what they call primary sources. If you are studying a person who lived in the 19th century, and you can find that person’s diary, you’ve hit the jackpot. The diary is a primary source. But it might not be the only one. Say the person was involved in a riot and wrote about it in the diary. But then you find a police report and the incident, and the person being studied, look completely different from the account in the diary. Then you have to weight the two primary sources against one another. Maybe the policeman was lazy or prejudiced. Or maybe the writer of the diary did something shameful and covered it up when writing about it. Part of what historians do is weight primary sources against one another. But if you have an account of that person written in 1920 long after she or he was dead, by someone who did not know the person, that would be a secondary source. It can be important, but cannot in itself solve most questions.

History-writing doesn’t stand still. In that regard, it is a little like science. If you want to know about the moon Titan that orbits around Saturn, you wouldn’t want to read a book about it written in 1942. You’d want to know the latest findings. But history isn’t exactly like science. There may be some insights in a book written in 1942 about the history of San Francisco that aren’t preserved in the most recent good book on the subject. Still, historians believe that as time has gone on, they have made advances in historical understanding.

Academic history began in late nineteenth-century Germany and Austria when historians developed a theory that if you wanted to study the Austrian diplomat Metternich, you would be best off looking at the memos he wrote. And in the late nineteenth century, governments started letting historians see closed government files, i.e. those from decades before, where the persons involved were dead and the issues were no longer salient. Closed, inactive government (and other) files of documents are called “archives.” Archives are to historians as a cow’s udder is to her calves.

The problem with the nineteenth century theory of history is that you get stuck studying government officials. Actually, Trump seems to want us stuck in that stage of history-writing, from a century and a half ago. From the late 1950s in particular, historians expanded their repertoire from kings and prime ministers and foreign ministers. E. P. Thompson studied the working class movements of nineteenth-century Britain.

Then came Second Wave feminism and historians turned to women’s history. Neither workers nor women had been big subjects in History departments, which had mostly been staffed by upper class men who graduated from Princeton and Harvard. Women did more doctorates and began to be hired. In 1972 the University of Michigan brought in carpenters and plumbers to put women’s bathrooms in the building that housed the History Department. Elizabeth Crosby had become the first woman full professor at Michigan in 1936, but she did not have that many female colleagues even in later decades. Princeton let in the first women students in 1969. Both women and men wrote gender history, but women brought new insights to it. History is like that. If you were a sailor before being a historian, you might be especially good at naval history. You bring to it your experiences, which help illumine the past.

Then historians became influenced by sociology and anthropology. They started writing the history of a city over, say, three decades. Or they might write the history of a religious movement, but not in the old way of only looking at the leaders. They’d try to find the diaries of the rank and file. They might look at what mainstream denominations thought of as heresies. And then they began looking at movements of minorities, under the influence of the Civil Rights Movement. African-Americans and Latinos/Latinas did more Ph.D.s in History and began being hired, and they wrote American history very differently than had the previous generation of diplomatic historians studying Warren Harding. The history of slavery became a big subject. Whereas white historians portrayed Jefferson’s form of slavery as benign, a new generation looked at it with gimlet eyes and found brutality and cupidity and concupiscence. The history of immigration from places other than Britain, France and Germany rose in the estimation of historians. Some regional history that had been relatively neglected, such as that of New Mexico where I was born, began attracting attention. It wasn’t all about Northeast WASPS any more.

Historians are wide-ranging. They have also taken an interest in the rise of the New Right under Ronald Reagan and his successors. The history of the white suburbs has been addressed. It isn’t all studies of Detroit auto workers, though they are important and are and should be studied.

In every case, historians weren’t just expanding their topics for the sake of diversity. They were trying to explain why history unfolded as it did, and they had become dissatisfied with the notion that it was because high government officials made particular decisions. While that is important, it is also important to look at the social movements that pushed the leaders in that direction. It wasn’t like Lyndon Johnson woke up one morning on 1964 and thought to himself, ‘By God we need a Voting Rights Act.’ He had a larger social context, which included Black young men sitting at a lunch counter in a department store where they were not allowed. The history of those young African-American men in places like Memphis is as important in its way as is a biography of Lyndon Johnson.

Trump and the people around him who wrote his speech, white nationalists like Stephen Miller, want to turn the clock back to a time when they imagine historians only wrote the history of white presidents and other elite actors, and when they did so with gushing praise. There never really was such a time. Professional historians have always been skeptical and the very tools of their profession are seditious, because history teaches us that things could have been different (contingency) and can still be different.

And that is what terrifies Trump and his white supremacist cronies.

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Bonus Video:

PBS NewsHour: “What Trump is saying about 1619 Project, teaching U.S. history”

The killing of George Floyd took place at the doorstep of Muslim America.

He was killed in front of Cup Foods, a store owned by an Arab American Muslim, whose teenage employee – also a Muslim – had earlier reported to police that Floyd tried to use a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes.

Muslim American businesses are common in lower-income areas, such as the part of Minneapolis where Floyd died after a police officer knelt on his neck. And as the writer Moustafa Bayoumi has noted, this puts stores in a precarious position – catering for the community while also duty-bound to report crime to the police, sometimes under the threat of being closed down if they don’t comply.

As a Muslim scholar of Islam who has written about the role of Muslims in the making of the United States, I recognize that the circumstances of Floyd’s death hint at the proximity and complex relationship that different sections of America’s Muslim community have with law enforcement and with the Black Lives Matter movement.

‘Too often silent’

Since Floyd’s killing, Muslim Americans have mostly shown solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.

Mahmoud Abumayyaleh, the owner of Cup Foods, has said that the store will no longer call the police on customers. Nationally, there have been numerous statements from groups such as the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Council on American Islamic Relations and the American Muslim Institution.

A joint announcement by over 35 national Muslim civil rights and faith groups and more than 60 regional groups noted that Black people were “often marginalized” within the broader Muslim community. It continued: “And when they fall victim to police violence, non-Black Muslims are too often silent, which leads to complicity.”

There have been Muslims in America for almost 500 years. Estevanico the Moor was brought as a slave to what is now Florida in 1528 and is memorialized on the Texas African American history monument as the first African to enter Texas. At least 10% of the slaves brought from West Africa were Muslim, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture tells some of their stories as part of its collection.

But, many African Americans came to Islam later through the Nation of Islam, which wove a Black nationalist element into their faith.

Speaking up

Black Muslims played a crucial role in the U.S. civil rights movement. Even today, quotes and images of civil rights activist Malcolm X, who converted to Sunni Islam in 1964 after leaving the Nation of Islam, remain potent in the current protests.

Meanwhile Muhammad Ali, who at one time was perhaps the most recognizable Muslim in the world, gained fame as much for his political stances as his boxing prowess. Ali led the way for other Muslim American athletes who have pushed for social change, including NBA great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was involved in discussions by the Olympic Project for Human Rights for Black athletes to boycott the 1968 games.

And 20 years before Colin Kaepernick, NBA player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf refused to stand for the national anthem while playing for the Denver Nuggets because of his “Muslim conscience.” Polling shows many of these protests were greeted with disdain by the majority of white America.

Today, at least 20% of Muslims in the U.S. are Black Americans. But starting from the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, there has been a growth in immigrant Muslims coming to America.

While increasing overall numbers of Muslims in U.S., immigration has created a dividing line in the American Muslim community – between Muslims with an American heritage that stretched back generations and newer arrivals. Immigrant Muslims were often assumed by American Muslims to know more about Islam as they came from Muslim majority countries, and so they were given more authority in Muslim organizations and as Islamic leaders.

They also built mosques that served their own ethnic communities, with immigrant Muslim communities often worshiping separately from Black American Muslims.

There is also a split in the economic status of American Muslims. According to the Pew Forum, 24% of American Muslims have an annual income above US$100,000, while 40% have an income below $30,000. Many of those who are wealthy – like billionaire Shahid Khan, an immigrant from Pakistan who now owns the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars – are from immigrant Muslim communities.

Police and protests

The intersection of race, class and national identity means that views vary on issues such as police, protests and discrimination. A 2019 survey found that 92% of Black Muslims believe there is a lot of discrimination against Black people, compared with 66% of non-Black Muslims.

Nonimmigrant Muslims are more likely to have lived out the history of the United States, including the unjust legacy of slavery. As Americans, they were also taught early on and often that the right to protest is protected under the Constitution.

Immigrant Muslims may have a very different experience with protest if they come from a country where dissent can lead to imprisonment or death. They may also be more wary of being seen as “anti-American.” Immigrant Muslims expressed more pride in being American than U.S.-born Black Muslims, in a 2017 Pew poll.

Both communities, however, share a complicated history of U.S. law enforcement. For Black Americans, police violence dates back to slavery. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, police in cities like Los Angeles and New York have tried to infiltrate and surveil American Muslims.

In vowing to stop calling the police on its customers, the Muslim-owned Cup Foods in Minneapolis is standing in solidarity with the largely Black community it serves. In a similar fashion, the soul-searching that has followed Floyd’s killing provides an opportunity for Muslim Americans of all backgrounds to unite and side with the oppressed, many of whom share their faith.

Amir Hussain, Professor of Theological Studies, Loyola Marymount University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Protesters Make Room for Muslim Prayers During BLM March | NowThis

As soon as I heard of the attacks, I immediately feared that innocent Muslims world would be traumatized and persecuted through profiling and discrimination for a crime that we did not commit. This conclusion is based on my own experience as a Muslim American woman.

Trump himself fanned the flames of hatred of innocent Muslims just this week by retweeting a photoshopped image of House majority leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer dressed in Middle Eastern garb. The White House said that he did so to underline the Democratic support for terrorism (!).

As an American who grew up here, it makes me furious that my home country preaches inclusivity and equal rights for all, but rarely delivers. The current crisis has caught in its unthinking net not only us Muslim-Americans in general, but in specific affects the half a million Iranian-Americans, 40% of whom reside in California.

To get a better perspective I asked one Iranian-born colleague about his experience with recent events and his thoughts on the relations between the U.S. and Iran. He told me that the bombing of Iran has left him with very mixed feelings. On one hand he left Iran due to their oppressive government and mistreatment of individuals, but now here in America, not only are they attacking his homeland but there is a steady rise of Islamophobia and hatred.

He told me of a story about a time when he was living in Iran and went to a party with his friends. At some point in the night police came into the house, started beating the guests, and they were eventually thrown in jail with zero explanation. He explained that this was normal police behavior in Iran, and expressed a very negative opinion of the Iranian government because of its inhumane treatment of ordinary citizens.

Therefore, soon after turning 18, he left Iran for America in order to live a better life. However, soon after coming to the United States, he described how he and his sister went for a drive when someone ran up to their car at a stoplight, spit on the window, and yelled vulgar insults about his sister’s hijab or veil. He has reluctantly concluded that we really aren’t entirely welcome anywhere. With with U.S./Iran tensions skyrocketing, and given the openly racist and xenophobic discourse of our current president, our treatment can only get worse.

This was proven correct as just days after the attacks, we are already seeing a rise in profiling along the U.S.-Canadian border. Over the week of January 7th, over 200 Iranian-American families were detained and questioned at length on their political views, family, work history, birthplace, and more. Those detained were reported to have their keys, passports, phones, and other belongings confiscated during the duration of which they were interrogated. Some have reported to be held for 10+ hours.

This unethical and unlawful detainment of American citizens of Iranian extraction led the Council of American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a nonprofit civil rights advocacy group for Muslims, to step in and demand justice. CAIR says that they have so far worked with over 60 families in getting them out of the detention centers and back home safe. Many that were interviewed after being released expressed fear for themselves as well as their families. One such detainee, a 24-year-old medical student from Washington, reported that most of those being detained were already American citizens and as he continuously asked why he was being stopped and asked questions that had nothing to do with his travels he was told, “I’m sorry this is just the wrong time for you guys,” by a CBP member.

Claims were made that DHS had told the Americans Custom and Border Patrol to hold and question any person of Iranian decent, inciting the racial profiling. However, in true American fashion, CBP issued a statement on Twitter claiming that they were told no such thing and that the long lines and delays were due to holiday traffic, staffing shortages, and no profiling took place. The tweet was quickly debunked as several pictures as well as lawyers and leaders of non-profit organizations can confirm that almost all detainees were of Iranian descent. The Twitter statement also made sure to tiptoe around the word “detained,” however, lawmakers were quick to point out that just because there were no bars on the windows of the building, those being held in the “waiting rooms,” did in fact have their passports taken away and were therefore unable to go anywhere, hence, unlawfully detained.

The DHS has had quite the history of unlawfully detaining immigrants including Asian-Americans, and more recently, Latinos at Southern border, nor has it been transparent about its actions. Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington was keen to note that DHS was the same agency that denied family separations were happening, which turned out to be a lie. This continual denial and refusal of accountability for the way America treats its citizens is no new occurrence, but it continues to wreak havoc on countless American lives.

Furthermore, the way America targets and ostracizes (despite official denials) specific groups of people that pose no threat to the nation will help normalize unlawful harassment of Muslim-Americans in Europe and the West more generally. People from the Middle East come to America for a better life for themselves and their families, and don’t deserve to find harassment here. Their home countries, at the same time, often experience instability and terrorism, some of it deriving from American actions such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq. These Middle Eastern lawful immigrants therefore in many cases fear to return to their countries of origin, but face increasing obstacles in Trump’s America. Where should we go?

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

AP: “Iranian-Americans say they were detained at border”

“What do you think of when you hear “Persian” or “Iranian”? Iranian-Americans (aka Persians) break down common myths and misconceptions about them, and tell the world what being “Persian” really means. Iranian-Americans (aka Persians) break down common myths and misconceptions about them, and tell the world what being “Persian” really means.”

What People Get Wrong About Iranian-Americans [Becoming Iranian-American, Pt. 4] | AJ+

“Iranian-American AJ+ Producer Yara Elmjouie takes us to meet his parents and reflects on his own experience growing up as a second-generation Iranian-American.”

AJ+: “Between Iranian And American”

See also Iranian In L.A.: More Than Just A Stereotype [Becoming Iranian-American, Pt. 2] | AJ+

and

Why Are There So Many Iranians In Los Angeles? [Becoming Iranian-American, Pt. 1] | AJ+