1AC V1
Contention 1: Anti-Muslimism
Security fears of the racialized Islamic body underlie a culture of anti-Muslimism. This
xenophobic politics justifies racism, internment, and torture – a modern-day crusade
against Islam is made possible.
Ali ‘12 (Yaser Ali, JD in law from UC Berkeley, Managing Attorney at Yaser Ali Law and was the Judicial Law Clerk in the US Court of Appeals,
“Shariah and Citizenship—How Islamophobia Is Creating a Second-Class Citizenry in America”, August 1 2012,
http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4176&context=californialawreview)
There was a clear discursive shift in Islamophobic discourse after 9/11. What was previously
considered unacceptable speech now permeated the discourse. During this time, pundits and public
officials construed the stereotypical Muslim male—personifying all the Orientalist tropes and
characteristics Lewis and Huntington described in the 1990s—as the primary threat to American security.97 The
discursive shift transcended political affiliation. One prominent conservative columnist, Ann Coulter, wrote on
September 12, 2001, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.
We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpetbombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.”98 Richard Cohen, writing in the
Washington Post one month after 9/11, added: One hundred percent of the terrorists involved in the Sept. 11
mass murder were Arabs. Their accomplices, if any, were probably Arabs too, or at least Muslims.
Ethnicity and religion are the very basis of their movement. It hardly makes sense, therefore, to ignore
that fact and, say, give Swedish au pair girls heading to the United States the same scrutiny as Arab
men coming from the Middle East.99 Politicians, too, appeared to be competing as to who could look strongest on national
defense. Attorney General John Ashcroft, one of the most vociferous critics of Islam in public office at the time, stated, “Islam is a religion in
which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you.”100 In a speech to the
U.S. Conference of Mayors, he stated: “Let the terrorists among us be warned: if you overstay your visa—even by one day—we will arrest you.
If you violate a local law, you will be put in jail and kept in custody as long as possible. We will use every available statute. We will seek every
prosecutorial advantage.”101 Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Republican Senator from Georgia, went even further, stating that homeland security
would be improved by turning the sheriff loose to “arrest every Muslim that comes across the state line.”102 Perhaps
the most
notorious and destructive comment was President Bush’s description of the War on Terror as a
“crusade,”103 a statement that outraged Muslims around the world and led to intense damage control
efforts on the part of the White House.104 Although it was conceivably just an ill advised and unintentional statement by the
President, the comment nonetheless suggested that the collective enemy was Islam; and further, to
some Muslims, it engendered strong notions of the Middle Ages, when Christian armies embarked on
numerous battles with an expressed goal of conquering Muslim lands.105 Professor Victor Romero describes how
the underlying rhetoric after 9/11 was reminiscent of that used toward the Japanese Americans after
the attack on Pearl Harbor.106 He cites a quote from General DeWitt, the chief enforcer of the internment camps: Further evidence
of the Commanding General’s attitude toward individuals of Japanese ancestry is revealed in his voluntary testimony on April 13, 1943, in San
Francisco before the House Naval Affairs Subcommittee to Investigate Congested Areas: . . . “I don’t want any of them (persons of Japanese
ancestry) here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty. The west coast contains too many vital installations
essential to the defense of the country to allow any Japanese on this coast . . . . The danger of the Japanese was, and is now—if they are
permitted to come back— espionage and sabotage. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. American
citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty . . . . But we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.
Sabotage and espionage will make problems as long as he is allowed in this area . . . . 107 As described above, the language employed by
General DeWitt was indeed strikingly similar to that used against American Muslims after 9/11. As
a result of this framing, the
average “Muslim” in America was presumptively considered disloyal and a threat, irrespective of his
or her formal citizenship status. In fact, according to one poll, less than half of the respondents during
the period shortly after 9/11 believed that American Muslims were loyal to the United States.108 In
one particularly troubling Gallup Poll shortly after 9/11, one-third of respondents supported such
drastic measures as the internment of Arab Americans or the special surveillance of Arabs living in the
United States.109 This biased public perception was no doubt a necessary precursor to the large-scale
encroachment on civil liberties that targeted American Muslims in the following months and years. 2.
Ramifications for the Muslim Community The repercussions of such statements were severe in both the private
and public spheres. Muslims were cast as disloyal outsiders and noncitizens. Under the broad umbrella of
“national security policy,” the government institutionalized numerous civil liberties violations, including
intrusive airport inspections, increased FBI surveillance and warrantless wiretapping, the use of
agents provocateurs in mosques, and, in some cases, even torture and suspension of habeas corpus
rights.110 Within two months of 9/11, law enforcement officials detained more than 1200 individuals
in dragnet searches, most of whom were from the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa.111 In 2004
alone, the FBI initiated a campaign to interview 5000 Muslim men to obtain leads on terrorist attacks.112
The government detained countless others as “material witnesses,” but neither the exact number nor the names of such persons have been
revealed—again for national security purposes.113 Similarly, whereas before 9/11 President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft publicly
denounced racial profiling tactics,114 their positions quickly changed after 9/11.115
Public sentiment on the issue followed
suit, with over half of Americans polled approving racial profiling at airports nearly two weeks after
the attacks.116 The government—seizing on the public endorsement of discriminatory policies toward
Muslims at the time—implemented four distinct practices of targeting people who appeared
“Muslim”: profiling airline passengers, secret arrests, the institution of new race-based immigration
policies, and selective enforcement of generally applicable immigration laws.117 Airlines frequently
removed Muslim passengers from flights without cause—even removing one of President Bush’s
Secret Service agents because he looked Muslim.118 Professor Muneer Ahmad cites two particularly egregious examples of
profiling. The first involved a United Airlines pilot refusing to fly a U.S. citizen of Egyptian origin out of Tampa, Florida, because his name was
“Mohammad,” and the second was a situation in Austin, Texas, where passengers applauded as two Pakistani men were removed from a
flight.119
Surveillance operates off of cultural markers which racialize Muslimness – that relies
on a pre-emptive model in which racialized features demarcate populations
supposedly prone to violence – the result is the erosion of civil liberties and
dehumanization.
Kundnani & Kumar ‘15 (Arun, Deepa; Spring 2015; professor @ NYU, and author on domestic surveillance; professor of Middle
East Studies @ Rutgers; “Race, surveillance, and empire” http://isreview.org/issue/96/race-surveillance-and-empire)
Discussions of the surveillance of Muslim Americans usually begin with 9/11 and make little attempt to locate them in the longer history of
racial surveillance in the United States. Yet the continuities are striking, particularly for Black
Muslims, who have been seen as
to national security monitoring since the 1940s. Already in the late 1960s, Arab
American student groups involved in supporting the Palestinian national movement had come under
surveillance and, in 1972, the Nixon administration issued a set of directives known as Operation
Boulder that enabled the CIA and FBI to coordinate with the pro-Israel lobby in monitoring Arab
activists. By the 1980s, but especially after 9/11, a process was under way in which “Muslimness” was racialized
through surveillance—another scene of the state’s production of racial subjects. Since all racisms are
socially and politically constructed rather than resting 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.58 This signification then serves to indicate a people supposedly
prone to violence and terrorism, which, under the War on Terror, justifies a whole panoply of surveillance and
criminalization, from arbitrary arrests, to indefinite detention, deportation, torture, solitary
confinement, the use of secret evidence, and sentencing for crimes that “we” would not be jailed for, such as
extremists and subject
speech, donations to charitable organizations, and other such acts considered material support for
terrorism. Significantly, the racial underpinnings of the War on Terror sustain not just domestic repression but foreign abuses—the war’s
vast death toll in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere could not be sustained without the dehumanization of its Muslim
victims. As before, racism at home goes hand in hand with empire abroad. Counterinsurgency thinking that informed the
strategies used in Iraq and Afghanistan in the face of popular insurrection are also brought home to be deployed in relation to Muslim American
populations. Winning “hearts and minds,” the counterinsurgency slogan first introduced by British colonialists in Malaya, and then adopted by
the US military in Vietnam, reappears as the phrase that state planners invoke to prevent “extremism” among young Muslims in the United
States. Counterinsurgency in this context means
total surveillance of Muslim populations, and building law
enforcement agency partnerships with “good Muslims,” those who are willing to praise US policy and
become sources of information on dissenters, making life very difficult for “bad Muslims” or those
who refuse (in ways reminiscent of the “good” and “bad” Indians). It is a way of ensuring that the knowledge Muslims tend to have of how
US foreign policy harms the Middle East, Africa, and Asia is not shared with others. The real fear of the national security state
is not the stereotypical Muslim fanatic but the possibility that other groups within US society might
build alliances with Muslims in opposition to empire. The various measures that the US national security system has
adopted in recent years flow from an analysis of Muslim “radicalization,” which assumes that certain law-abiding activities associated with
religious ideology are indicators of extremism and potential violence. Following the preventive logic discussed above, the
radicalization
model claims to be able to predict which individuals are not terrorists now but might be at some later
date. Behavioral, cultural, and ideological signals are assumed to reveal who is at risk of turning into a
terrorist at some point in the future.59 For example, in the FBI’s radicalization model, such things as
growing a beard, starting to wear traditional Islamic clothing, and becoming alienated from one’s
former life are listed as indicators, as is “increased activity in a pro-Muslim social group or political
cause.”60 Thus, signifiers of Muslimness such as facial hair, dress, and so on are turned into markers of
suspicion for a surveillance gaze that is also a racial (and gendered) gaze; it is through such routine bureaucratic
mechanisms that counterterrorism practices involve the social construction of racial others. Official
acceptance of the model of radicalization implies a need for mass surveillance of Muslim populations
and collection of as much data as possible on every aspect of their lives in order to try to spot the
supposed warning signs that the models list. And this is exactly the approach that law enforcement agencies introduced. At
the New York Police Department, for instance, the instrumentalizing of radicalization models led to the mass, warrantless surveillance of every
aspect of Muslim life. Dozens
of mosques in New York and New Jersey and hundreds more “hot spots,” such
as restaurants, cafés, bookshops, community organizations, and student associations were listed as
potential security risks. Undercover officers and informants eavesdropped at these “locations of
interest” to listen for radical political and religious opinions. A NYPD “Moroccan Initiative” compiled a
list of every known Moroccan taxi driver. Muslims who changed their names to sound more
traditionally American or who adopted Arabic names were investigated and catalogued in secret
NYPD intelligence files. It is clear that none of this activity was based on investigating reasonable
suspicions of criminal activity. This surveillance produced no criminal leads between 2006 and 2012,
and probably did not before or after.61 As of 2008, the FBI had a roster of 15,000 paid informants and, according to Senator
Dianne Feinstein of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the bureau had 10,000 counterterrorism intelligence analysts in 2013.63 The proportion
of these informants and analysts who are assigned to Muslim populations in the United States is unknown but is likely to be substantial. The
kinds of infiltration and provocation tactics that had been practiced against Black radicals in the 1960s
are being repeated today. What has changed are the rationales used to justify them: it is no longer the threat of Black nationalist
subversion, but the threat of Muslim radicalization that is invoked. With new provisions in the Clinton administration’s 1996 Antiterrorism and
Effective Death Penalty Act, the
FBI can launch investigations of a suspected individual or organization simply
for providing “material support” to terrorism—a vague term that could include ideological activity
unrelated to any actual plot to carry out violence. While COINTELPRO violated federal laws, today
similar kinds of investigation and criminalization of political dissent can be carried out legitimately in
the name of countering terrorism. For Muslim populations on the receiving end of state surveillance
programs designed to prevent “radicalization,” everyday life increasingly resembles the patterns
described in classic accounts of authoritarianism. There is the same sense of not knowing whom to
trust and choosing one’s words with special care when discussing politics, and of the arbitrariness and
unpredictability of state power.64 With the 2011 leaking of some NYPD intelligence files, individual Muslims have had the
disturbing experience of seeing their names mentioned in government files, along with details of their private lives. Numerous businesses,
cafés, restaurants, and mosques in New York are aware that the NYPD considers them hotspots and deploys informants to monitor them. And
the recent outing of a small number of NYPD informants has meant some Muslims in New York have found that relationships they thought of as
genuine friendships were actually covert attempts to gather intelligence.
Policy actions and cultural anti-Muslimism mutually reinforce one another –
codification of racism in the law normalizes surveillance, exclusion, and violence.
Khalek, interviewing Abbas ‘14 (Rania; Gadeir Abbas; independent journalist; attorney with the Council on AmericanIslamic Relations; Underclass, “How NSA Spying Impacts Muslim Communities and Cultivates Islamophobia”
http://raniakhalek.com/2014/01/26/how-nsa-spying-impacts-muslim-communities-and-cultivates-islamophobia/)
ABBAS: I agree wholeheartedly that the fear of Islam, the fear
of Muslims, is a notion I think has been cultivated by policy
choices at the federal level. The use of airport screenings, that inevitably cultivates and reflects the
bias that people have against Muslims, has I think created space for an anti-Muslim movement to take
root. Right after September 11, you didn’t have your Act for America’s, your David Yerushalmi’s, your Center for Security Policy’s—this
well-organized, well-financed movement dedicated towards marginalizing Muslims and that gave rise
to essentially and engine of generating anti-Muslim sentiment that creates this terrible and despicable
cycle where now you have the overt argument being made that Muslims are here in the United States
to abrogate the US constitution, to overthrow the US government and replace it with Sharia law, which
couldn’t be further from the truth. As the facts would have it, the American Muslim community is a well-educated, well-integrated and looking
to continue to do so in the world. You can’t identify an American Muslim radical voice in the United States, whereas if you go to Europe, you
can find people that have a platform that say despicable objectionable things. In the US, that’s just not the case. But we still have in the US,
which is really exporting anti-Muslim sentiment to other parts of the world especially Europe, we
still have this fear of Islam that
absolutely does give rise to justify these surveillance policies. GOSZTOLA: So for people who are hearing this debate
and they maybe think it’s kind of abstract, we’ve been hearing people talk about collection of the information and then we’ve been hearing
about how the information is stored. And right now when we’re talking about the program under the Patriot Act, the Section 215 program,
which is the bulk records collection of the phone records, it’s all about who’s going to hold it, who’s going to store it, and it’s kind of like we’re
not talking about the collection. I’d like you to talk about why the collection would be really bad and I think a thing you could address is how the
collection of people’s information in Muslim communities in New York is a huge deal for them and collecting that information is the beginning
of the injustice. ABBAS: Absolutely. What we know a lot about now regarding the NSA’s surveillance programs is what is collected, some of the
searching mechanisms that can be utilized to sift through the collected information. But what
we really get to see in more
granular detail with the NYPD’s specifically designed Muslim surveillance program is how
indiscriminately collected information gets utilized and what people in positions of authority that can
collect such information think is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars. And what we find is that the NYPD
thought it was absolutely worth taxpayer money to send their agents on camping trips of 19 and 20year-old college students. They thought it was absolutely critical for them to map the Muslim
community in Newark, New Jersey, and beyond, identifying every halal grocery store, every halal
restaurant. These things are laughable when we see them up close and in granular detail and just like the PCLOB board has determined
itself, a board that was authorized by Congress years ago, that the sifting through everybody’s information on an ongoing
basis actually is not only objectionable in itself but it’s not productive by any criteria. So you have for instance
James Clapper arguing that there’s the ‘peace of mind’ quotients that is part of the benefit of their surveillance program because we’re
monitoring everything. At the very least we know that nothing is happening. But this
mentality that gave rise to the NSA
program is really the objectionable thing that needs to end because it gives rise to not only
indiscriminate collection of information automatically through these telecommunications companies,
but it’s also given rise to a network of 15,000 FBI informants that have saturated the Muslim
community across the country, that are sent to mosques without any type of criminal predicate just to
collect information because there’s a sense that that’s where the problem. And that’s the inevitable result of indiscriminate collection. It’s
always going to be the case that indiscriminate collection—in addition to not being productive—will lead to despicable consequences.
Surveillance produces racialized others – combatting surveillance logic is necessary to
deal with the modern racial order.
Kundnani and Kumar 2015 [Arun (professor @ NYU, and author on domestic surveillance) and Deepa (professor of Middle
East Studies @ Rutgers), Spring 2015, “Race, surveillance, and empire”, http://isreview.org/issue/96/race-surveillance-and-empire, Accessed
7/14/15, AX]
Beginning in June 2013, a series of news articles based on whistle-blower Edward
Snowden’s collection of documents from
the National Security Agency (NSA) took the world by storm. Over the course of a year, the Snowden material provided a detailed
account of the massive extent of NSA’s warrantless data collection. What became clear was that the NSA was involved in the mass
collection of online material. Less apparent was how this data was actually used by the NSA and other national security agencies.
Part of the answer came in July 2014 when Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain published an article that identified specific
targets of NSA surveillance and showed how individuals were being placed under surveillance despite
there being no reasonable suspicion of their involvement in criminal activity .1 All of those named as
targets were prominent Muslim Americans. The following month, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux published another story
for The Intercept, which revealed that under the Obama administration the number of people on the National Counterterrorism Center’s no-fly
list had increased tenfold to 47,000. Leaked classified documents showed that the
NCC maintains a database of terrorism
suspects worldwide—the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment—which contained a million names by 2013,
double the number four years earlier, and increasingly includes biometric data. This database includes 20,800 persons within
the United States who are disproportionately concentrated in Dearborn, Michigan, with its significant
Arab American population.2 By any objective standard, these were major news stories that ought to have attracted as much
attention as the earlier revelations. Yet the stories barely registered in the corporate media landscape. The “tech community,”
which had earlier expressed outrage at the NSA’s mass digital surveillance, seemed to be indifferent
when details emerged of the targeted surveillance of Muslims. The explanation for this reaction is not hard to find.
While many object to the US government collecting private data on “ordinary” people, Muslims tend
to be seen as reasonable targets of suspicion. A July 2014 poll for the Arab American Institute found that 42 percent of
Americans think it is justifiable for law enforcement agencies to profile Arab Americans or American
Muslims.3 In what follows, we argue that the debate on national security surveillance that has emerged in the United
States since the summer of 2013 is woefully inadequate, due to its failure to place questions of race and empire
at the center of its analysis. It is racist ideas that form the basis for the ways national security
surveillance is organized and deployed, racist fears that are whipped up to legitimize this surveillance to
the American public, and the disproportionately targeted racialized groups that have been most effective in
making sense of it and organizing opposition. This is as true today as it has been historically: race and state
surveillance are intertwined in the history of US capitalism. Likewise, we argue that the history of national
security surveillance in the United States is inseparable from the history of US colonialism and empire.
The argument is divided into two parts. The first identifies a number of moments in the history of national security surveillance in North
America, tracing its imbrication with race, empire, and capital, from the settler-colonial period through to the neoliberal era. Our focus here is
on how race
as a sociopolitical category is produced and reproduced historically in the United States
through systems of surveillance. We show how throughout the history of the United States the systematic collection of
information has been interwoven with mechanisms of racial oppression. From Anglo settler-colonialism, the
establishment of the plantation system, the post–Civil War reconstruction era, the US conquest of the
Philippines, and the emergence of the national security state in the post-World War II era, to
neoliberalism in the post-Civil Rights era, racialized surveillance has enabled the consolidation of
capital and empire. It is, however, important to note that the production of the racial “other” at these
various moments is conjunctural and heterogenous. That is, the racialization of Native Americans, for instance, during the
settler-colonial period took different forms from the racialization of African Americans. Further, the dominant construction of
Blackness under slavery is different from the construction of Blackness in the neoliberal era; these
ideological shifts are the product of specific historic conditions. In short, empire and capital, at various
moments, determine who will be targeted by state surveillance, in what ways, and for how long. In the
second part, we turn our attention to the current conjuncture in which the politics of the War on Terror shape national security surveillance
practices. The
intensive surveillance of Muslim Americans has been carried out by a vast security
apparatus that has also been used against dissident movements such as Occupy Wall Street and
environmental rights activists, who represent a threat to the neoliberal order. This is not new; the process
of targeting dissenters has been a constant feature of American history. For instance, the Alien and Sedition Acts of
the late 1790s were passed by the Federalist government against the Jeffersonian sympathizers of the French Revolution. The British hanged
Nathan Hale because he spied for Washington’s army in the American Revolution. State
surveillance regimes have always
sought to monitor and penalize a wide range of dissenters, radicals, and revolutionaries. Race was a
factor in some but by no means all of these cases. Our focus here is on the production of racialized
“others” as security threats and the ways this helps to stabilize capitalist social relations. Further, the
current system of mass surveillance of Muslims is analogous to and overlaps with other systems of
racialized security surveillance that feed the mass deportation of immigrants under the Obama
administration and that disproportionately target African Americans, contributing to their mass
incarceration and what Michelle Alexander refers to as the New Jim Crow.4 We argue that racialized groupings are produced
in the very act of collecting information about certain groups deemed as “threats” by the national
security state—the Brown terrorist, the Black and Brown drug dealer and user, and the immigrant
who threatens to steal jobs. We conclude that “security” has become one of the primary means through
which racism is ideologically reproduced in the “post-racial,” neoliberal era. Drawing on W. E. B. Dubois’s notion
of the “psychological wage,” we argue that neoliberalism has been legitimized in part through racialized notions of
security that offer a new “psychological wage” as compensation for the decline of the social wage and
its reallocation to “homeland security.”
Plan
Plan: The United States federal government should apply an effects test to strict
scrutiny to declare federal profiling in surveillance unconstitutional.
Contention 2: Solvency
The strict scrutiny would immediately declare profiling in surveillance
unconstitutional.
Love ‘12 (Erik; 2/9/12; Assistant Professor of Sociology @ Dickinson College, Fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding;
"NYPD: Whose side are you on?" http://www.ispu.org/GetArticles/48/2461/Publications.aspx)
The problem with the NYPD's wanton disregard for the principle of equal protection is that all US
citizens are affected by the harmful discrimination. People of colour - including Arab, Sikh and South
Asian Americans - have borne the brunt of the NYPD's Islamophobic policies, in which Muslim
Americans have become one of the latest targets of unwarranted police attention. But it doesn't matter what
your faith or skin colour is: the biggest police department in the United States has policies that are taking away everyone's civil rights. The
NYPD clearly operates a programme based on the bigoted (and wrong) idea that the more religious
you are, the more likely you are to carry out a terrorist attack - if you're Muslim, that is. An ongoing
investigation by the Associated Press into the New York Police Department (NYPD) has uncovered the actions of a "counter-terrorism"
programme that has involved the extensive use of discriminatory profiling against Muslim American
communities. The details of this programme are shocking. As discussed on Al Jazeera, among the many outlandish efforts undertaken by
the NYPD, police officers went undercover and monitored the mundane daily activities of Muslim
American college students in New York and in many other states. Police officers also recorded banal
details about restaurants and places of worship where Muslims often congregate. In developing some of these
programmes, the AP found documents proving that the NYPD coordinated with a CIA agent, which could indicate a
gross violation of the CIA's prohibition against engaging in domestic surveillance. Several dozen advocacy
organisations from around the country have asked for state and federal investigations of the NYPD. So far, no
formal investigations have been announced. As a result, the NYPD's mistaken idea that "more Muslim =
more terrorism" has been left largely unchallenged in the actual courts and in the court of public
opinion. Abuse of freedom The impact of these programmes on Muslim American communities has been profound. It's not an exaggeration
to say that basic democratic freedoms have been abused by the NYPD. A report from WNYC found that Muslims
have stopped "frequenting places out of fear of being monitored, or avoiding discussion of politically
sensitive topics". This sounds like political oppression of the first order. Unfortunately, the damage wrought by the
NYPD's anti-Muslim programme extends far beyond the Muslim American community. Anyone in the United States who fits
the racialised description of "Muslim" (having a beard, wearing a headdress, having brown skin) can
expect to face increased discrimination as the result of the legitimation of the NYPD's anti-Muslim
policy. The legitimacy afforded this sort of knee-jerk bigotry by the NYPD is all too simple. If it's okay
for the NYPD to single out Muslims, when the NYPD is a brave force for public safety and service, then
it must be okay for any law-abiding American to feel the same way towards Muslims or anyone who
looks Muslim. The widespread approval of the anti-Muslim approach among New Yorkers is perhaps the most troubling part of this story.
The AP began its extensive reporting on the NYPD's discriminatory programmes in August 2011, but a February 2012 poll and a March 2012 poll
of New York City voters found that nearly 60 per cent felt that the NYPD has acted "appropriately", with only 20 per cent saying the police
department "unfairly targeted Muslims". As if to underscore the idea that the NYPD can do no wrong, on March 5, a few dozen Muslim
Americans rallied with conservative Congressman Peter King (R-NY) to express their support for the NYPD. Scrutiny Despite the recent
outpouring of support of these discriminatory programmes, a
federal investigation of the NYPD's practices is sorely
needed. It's likely that if the NYPD's crudely constructed policies of religious and racial profiling were
brought into the courts, the judicial principle of strict scrutiny would definitively show that the NYPD
had grossly violated the constitutional right to equal protection under the law. Strict scrutiny is the
standard applied by the courts to determine whether the government can move beyond
constitutional limits due to extraordinary circumstances. It's called "strict" because the government
must rise to a tripartite standard: first, it must prove that it has a compelling interest; second, that the
policy is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest; and, finally, the policy must use the least
restrictive means to achieve that interest. Preventing terrorism is, undoubtedly, a compelling state
interest. But spying on anyone who happens to be in a mosque or restaurant cannot possibly be
"narrowly tailored". Similarly, a programme so paranoid that it spied on its own anti-terrorism
partners and kept track of any Muslim who changed their name clearly isn't the "least restrictive
means" towards achieving the goal of anti-terrorism.
Applying an effects test to strict scrutiny would declare all programs with disparate
impact unconstitutional.
Figueroa ‘12 (Tiffani; Winter; associate @ Morrison Foerster’s Litigation Department; Hofstra Law Review, “"All Muslims Are Like That":
How Islamophobia Is Diminishing Americans' Right To Receive Information”)
V. A Solution To Deal With Free Speech Violations In The Face Of Islamophobia: The Effects Test As discussed above, the fear of Muslims or
those perceived as Muslim has resulted in the government's failure to protect Americans' First Amendment right to receive information.332
The strict scrutiny test that courts normally employ when assessing the content-neutrality of a regulation on speech has not been effective in
light of the increased development of Islamophobia.333 Following the 9/11 attacks, Islamophobia has impacted the free speech rights of
Muslims and the mobility of foreign scholars, as well as the right to receive information for all Americans.334 "In an age of official insecurity and
anxiety, the
most difficult constitutional problem may not be controlling arbitrariness in permitting, but
compensating for a chronic tendency to overestimate the likelihood of any damage to public security
from public exercises of freedom of speech. ' 335 Given the current state of events and the vulnerability of the right to receive
information, a new standard to deal with the right to receive information in times of political controversy
is required. In order to resolve this issue of dealing with national security and the right to receive information, courts should adopt
a specific test under First Amendment speech analysis where: (1) there is a political conflict and (2)
there is a clear group that society and the government targets because of the conflict. As discussed earlier,
the government may restrict the content of speech in certain situations; however, it cannot favor one viewpoint over another.336 The test
will essentially focus on the effects of a regulation on speech when a specific group is targeted by the
government action.337 Once the court determines there is a disparate impact on a certain group, the
court will then resolve the issue as to whether the government has curtailed the right to receive
information through this disproportionate treatment of the specified group. By first looking at the
effects of a government action, courts will provide a framework for which they can work through their
First Amendment analysis.338 When dealing with political conflicts, such as the war on terror, there are often certain groups
that are discriminated against through practices that seem constitutional . Such discrimination is not only
overlooked, but it has a subsequent effect on all Americans who are willing to explore different ideas other than those the government makes
readily available. 339 The
government's actions discussed above, such as dealing with speech at a protest,340
forcing a woman to remove her hijab in prison,341 and revoking the visas of foreign scholars 342 serve as
examples. These actions appear to be neutral; however, the effects of the actions unevenly target one
particular group: Muslims and those perceived as Muslim. 343 It is important that the courts look
beyond the language of the laws or government actions in order to gauge whether the government is
in fact practicing viewpoint discrimination and violating the First Amendment right to receive
information for Americans. 34 When looking at the effects of government actions: A law [may] not discriminate against a particular
viewpoint on its face, and there [may be] no evidence of an improper legislative purpose in enacting the law. Within that framework of facial
neutrality, however, we must examine restrictions on speech with particular care when their effects fall unevenly on different viewpoints and
groups in society. 345 Looking
at the effects of regulation on speech is something that the Supreme Court
itself has taken into consideration when looking at the right to receive information.346 As determined in
Martin v. Struthers,347 the Court explained that, "[i]n considering legislation which thus limits the dissemination of knowledge, we must 'be
astute to examine the effect of the challenged legislation' and must 'weigh the circumstances and appraise the substantiality of the reasons
advanced in support of the regulation.' ' 348 Courts have taken a similar stance in other cases. 34 9 The bottom line is: courts must look at the
effects of government regulations because laws that have a disparate impact on one viewpoint run the risk of being viewpoint-based.350 As in
the case of Islamophobia, it is easy to target a specific group because some Americans automatically associated the 9/11 hijackers with all
Muslims and those perceived as Muslim. 3 1 Similarly, in
the interest of national security, the government at times
partook in practices that people may view as discriminatory. The government failed to protect the
free speech rights of Muslims as a targeted group, and these actions subsequently harmed the right to
receive information for Americans. Although the government's purpose in enforcing the laws
discussed in this Note was not to close off Muslim ideas, the effects may show otherwise.352 Justice
Antonin Scalia stated, "[t]he vice of content based legislation-what renders it deserving of the high standard
of strict scrutiny-is not that it is always used for invidious, thought-control purposes, but that it lends
itself to use for those purposes. 353 "Unavoidable targeting" stemming from a government regulation is
included within this "vice of content-based legislation." This phenomenon may shine light on what has occurred following
the 9/11 attacks. By employing an effects test in the First Amendment analysis, courts will more efficiently
investigate whether there is viewpoint discrimination affecting the right to receive information since
the courts must first establish if a government action falls disproportionately on a specific group.354
A process called incorporation applies rights guaranteed in the Constitution to state
and local entities – this means that the strict scrutiny standard would spillover to solve
state and local violations.
US Constitution Online no date (“Constitutional Topic: The Bill of Rights”
http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_bor.html)
Incorporation One
of the greatest changes in the interpretation of the Constitution came with the passage
of the 14th Amendment after the conclusion of the Civil War. It was designed to assist newly freed slaves in the
transition to freedom and to protect them from acts of the Southern states, and also to overturn the decision in the Dred Scott case that ruled
that persons of African descent could not be citizens of the United States even if they were born in the United States. The amendment was
successful in this endeavor, legally, if not in reality. But this
sentence had and continues to have long-lasting
implications on the application of the Bill of Rights to the states: No State shall make or enforce any law which shall
abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without
due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. The
"Due Process Clause" has
been interpreted as applying the Bill of Rights, which lists the rights (or privileges and immunities) of the
citizens, to the states. Known as "incorporation," the application of the Bill to the states did not come all at once, nor is
incorporation complete. Even today, there are some parts of the Bill which have not been incorporated. The process began unsuccessfully in
the late 1800's and continued unsuccessfully right up until the 1930's. In 1947, however, in Adamson v California (332 U.S. 46 [1947]), the
Supreme Court began to accept the argument that the 14th Amendment requires the states to follow the protections of the Bill of Rights.
Historians both agreed and disagreed with the Court's contention that the framers of the 14th Amendment intended incorporation since its
passage ... but historians do not sit on the Court. Their opinions were less important than those of the Justices. The process of selectively
incorporating the clauses of the Bill of Rights is agreed to have begun in Twining v. New Jersey (268 U.S. 652 [1925]) which contemplated the
incorporation of some of the aspects of the 8th Amendment - not because they were a part of the Bill of Rights but because they seemed to be
fundamental to the concept of due process. This
process of incorporating parts of the Bill of Rights because of their
connection to due process began to run in parallel with the selective incorporation doctrine, where
parts of the Bill of Rights were ruled to be enforceable on the states by virtue of the 14th
Amendment, whether or not due process applied. Thus in the early 1960's, the Establishment Clause,
the right to counsel, the rights of free speech, assembly, and petition, and the right against
unreasonable searches and seizures were quickly incorporated. Since the early 60's, almost every
clause in the Bill of Rights has been incorporated (notable exceptions are the 2nd and 3rd Amendments, the grand jury
indictment clause of the 5th Amendment, and the 7th Amendment).
Resistance to bad governmental policies shouldn’t be limited to rejection – engaging
larger institutions is key to effectuate real-world change – this is especially true
because we are negative state action.
Themba-Nixon 2K (Makani Themba-Nixon, “Changing the Rules: What Public Policy Means for Organizing,” Colorlines. Oakland: Jul
31, 2000. Vol. 3, Iss. 2; pg. 12)
In essence, policies are the codification of power relationships and resource allocation. Policies
are the rules of the world we live
the world means changing the rules. So, if organizing is about changing the rules and building power, how can
organizing be separated from policies? Can we really speak truth to power, fight the right, stop
corporate abuses, or win racial justice without contesting the rules and the rulers, the policies and the
policymakers? The answer is no-and double no for people of color. Today, racism subtly dominates nearly every aspect of
policymaking. From ballot propositions to city funding priorities, policy is increasingly about the control, de-funding, and disfranchisement
in. Changing
of communities of color. What Do We Stand For? Take the public conversation about welfare reform, for example. Most of us know it isn't
really about putting people to work. The right's message was framed around racial stereotypes of lazy, cheating "welfare queens" whose
poverty was "cultural." But the new welfare policy was about moving billions of dollars in individual cash payments and direct services from
welfare recipients to other, more powerful, social actors. Many
of us were too busy to tune into the welfare policy drama
in Washington, only to find it washed up right on our doorsteps. Our members are suffering from
workfare policies, new regulations, and cutoffs. Families who were barely getting by under the old rules are being pushed
over the edge by the new policies. Policy doesn't get more relevant than this. And so we got involved in policy-as
defense. Yet we have to do more than block their punches. We have to start the fight with initiatives of
our own. Those who do are finding offense a bit more fun than defense alone. Living wage ordinances, youth
development initiatives, even gun control and alcohol and tobacco policies are finding their way onto
the public agenda, thanks to focused community organizing that leverages power for communitydriven initiatives. - Over 600 local policies have been passed to regulate the tobacco industry. Local
coalitions have taken the lead by writing ordinances that address local problems and organizing broad
support for them. - Nearly 100 gun control and violence prevention policies have been enacted since
1991. - Milwaukee, Boston, and Oakland are among the cities that have passed living wage ordinances: local laws that guarantee higher than
minimum wages for workers, usually set as the minimum needed to keep a family of four above poverty. These are just a few of the
examples that demonstrate how organizing for local policy advocacy has made inroads in areas where
positive national policy had been stalled by conservatives. Increasingly, the local policy arena is where the action is and where
activists are finding success. Of course, corporate interests-which are usually the target of these policies-are gearing up in defense. Tactics
include front groups, economic pressure, and the tried and true: cold, hard cash. Despite these barriers,
grassroots organizing
can be very effective at the smaller scale of local politics. At the local level, we have greater access to elected officials and officials have
a greater reliance on their constituents for reelection. For example, getting 400 people to show up at city hall in just
about any city in the U.S. is quite impressive. On the other hand, 400 people at the state house or the Congress would have a
less significant impact. Add to that the fact that all 400 people at city hall are usually constituents, and the impact is even greater. Recent trends
in government underscore the importance of local policy. Congress has enacted a series of measures devolving significant power to state and
local government. Welfare,
health care, and the regulation of food and drinking water safety are among the
areas where states and localities now have greater rule. Devolution has some negative consequences to
be sure. History has taught us that, for social services and civil rights in particular, the lack of clear federal standards and
mechanisms for accountability lead to uneven enforcement and even discriminatory implementation of
policies. Still, there are real opportunities for advancing progressive initiatives in this more localized
environment. Greater local control can mean greater community power to shape and implement important social policies that were
heretofore out of reach. To do so will require careful attention to the mechanics of local policymaking and a
clear blueprint of what we stand for. Getting It in Writing Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of
demands. By getting into the policy arena in a proactive manner, we can take our demands to the next
level. Our demands can become law, with real consequences if the agreement is broken. After all the
organizing, press work, and effort, a group should leave a decisionmaker with more than a handshake and his or her word. Of course, this
work requires a certain amount of interaction with "the suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy, the technical
language, and the all-too-common resistance by decisionmakers. Still, if it's worth demanding, it's worth having in writing-whether as law,
regulation, or internal policy. From ballot initiatives on rent control to laws requiring worker protections, organizers are leveraging their power
into written policies that are making a real difference in their communities. Of course, policy
work is just one tool in our organizing
arsenal, but it is a tool we simply can't afford to ignore. Making policy work an integral part of organizing will require a certain
amount of retrofitting. We will need to develop the capacity to translate our information, data, and experience into stories that are designed to
affect the public conversation. Perhaps most important, we will need
to move beyond fighting problems and on to
framing solutions that bring us closer to our vision of how things should be. And then we must be committed to
making it so.
The aff uses the government as a heuristic to resist its worst acts of violence – this
forces us to take responsibility for political choices.
Zanotti ‘14 (Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research and teaching
include critical political theory as well as international organizations, UN peacekeeping, democratization and the role of NGOs
in post-conflict governance.“Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World” –
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political – vol 38(4):p. 288-304,. A little unclear if this is late 2013 or early 2014 – The Stated “Version
of Record” is Feb 20, 2014, but was originally published online on December 30th, 2013. Obtained via Sage Database)
By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that
focuses on power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context of agonic relations.
Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to ‘‘rejection,’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or ‘‘dispossession’’ to
regain a pristine ‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and
contingent struggles that are constituted within the scripts of governmental rationalities and at the same time
exceed and transform them. This approach questions oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal
political rationalities and of their interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical skepticism about
identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems. International power
interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed,
hijacked, and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It invites
historically situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than overarching demonizations of ‘‘power,’’
romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in nonsubstantialist terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for
political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative
formulations also foster
an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously taken up through plural and
uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of fixations on
‘‘what ought to be.’’83 Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine
‘‘freedom’’ to be regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with
whatever cards are available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the consequences
of political choices. To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is
dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads
not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.’’84