1AC
Contention 1: Islamophobia
Surveillance programs disproportionately target Muslim-American communities;
places of worship, business, community centers, and even student organization are
subject to forms of mass surveillance.
Shahabuddin ‘15 [Madiha Shahabuddin, Shahabuddin is the Editor of The Chapman Law Review and has a JD from University of
California, 2/16/15, Chapman Law Review, “The More Muslim You Are, the More Trouble You Can Be: How
Government Surveillance of Muslim Americans Violates First Amendment Rights” vol 18, issue 2, pg.
582-587] Accessed Online: 7/08/15 http://www.chapman.edu/law/_files/publications/clr-18shahabuddin.pdf
During World War II, the Japanese community in California was mapped much like the mapping of Muslim communities in the United States
today, the justification then being that it would protect America from another attack after Pearl Harbor.36 Local
law enforcement
have recently implemented mapping and surveillance programs of Muslims, as evinced by the 2007 Los Angeles
Police Department (LAPD) plan to map local Muslims and the more recent NYPD surveillance of East Coast/New York area Muslims, which
“[e]erily . . . bears [a] striking resemblance to the mistreatment experienced by Japanese Americans in
the wake of Pearl Harbor.” 37 In 1956, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) began its Counter Intelligence Program
(COINTELPRO), which spied on individuals and groups identified as “subversive” to “neutralize . . . radical or immoral activity.” 38 Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., the NAACP, civil rights groups, the ACLU, and even the Boy Scouts of America were targets of government spying in this era, for
fear that these organizations or individuals were infiltrated, or influenced, by Communism.39 A few decades later, during the 1960s and 1970s,
the government cast its net of surveillance wider, to include anti-Vietnam War advocates, the Black Panthers, the “New Left,” and women’s
rights groups.40 It was around this time that local law enforcement set up their own programs to conduct surveillance on a local level, such as
the “New York Red Squad,” which “was reported to have files on over one million people.”41 After the 1972 attacks at the Munich Olympic
Games and “[a]s early as 1986, the government was considering plans to use two military bases to detain Arab- and Iranian-Americans in the
same vein as the Japanese internment of World War II.” Most
recently, the post-9/11 era has been characterized by
government surveillance of Muslim American communities in the name of counterterrorism efforts.43 The
government’s conduct in this surveillance program was highlighted in news stories that broke around August 2011 about the NYPD conducting
mass surveillance of Muslim communities in New York.44 The Associated Press ran a series of investigative reports on this topic, noting that the
NYPD effectively “monitored every aspect of Muslim life and built databases on where innocent Muslims
eat, shop, work and pray.” 45 And in July 2014, it was revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had—at the minimum—
spied on five “politically active” Muslim American leaders, including a past Bush administration official, a successful attorney, a Rutgers
professor, a former California State University professor, and an executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).46 At
the root of these investigations is the tool of profiling, which allows the NYPD, FBI, or other
governmental entity to target certain groups of individuals solely based upon their religious affiliation
and pursue an almost carte blanche “fishing expedition” for evidence condemning the targeted Muslim
of some link to terrorist activity.47 Justification for this treatment of Muslim American communities has
come from the idea that the post-9/11 era calls for “urgent” action to thwart mass destruction that can
come from a potential terror attack, and therefore—as the argument goes—constitutional
infringements like this are a “small price to pay for [America’s] safety.” At the core of this issue is what
Sahar F. Aziz has called “selective counterterrorism enforcement.”49 This manifests itself in: the disproportionate
targeting of Muslims for surveillance;50 government-sent informants tasked with infiltration and what
many have argued should be legally considered entrapment of individuals; 51 and mapping and spying on
predominantly Muslim neighborhoods, Muslim-owned businesses, mosques, and Muslim Student
Associations.52 Outside the scope of this Comment, but still critically troubling, are the deportations of religious
leaders and imams for sermons “deemed too critical of the American government,” 53 the criminalization
and prosecution of charitable and humanitarian aid organizations under sweeping material support
statutes,54 and private acts of prejudice against Muslims in the form of mosque vandalism and
employment discrimination.55 As author and investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson argues, in the context of surveillance of
Muslims, the government has used intelligence gathering as a means of “manufacturing” counterterror prosecutions that result in “what a
federal judge has called a ‘fantasy terror operation’” created and incited by a government informant.56 Such intelligence gathering assists the
government “in furtherance of an adversarial system that prioritizes bolstering the number of terrorism investigations, prosecutions, and
convictions of Muslims in America.” Additionally, Aziz refutes the presumption about domestic or “homegrown” terrorism in the United States
being the result of radicalization of all Muslim Americans within their own communities.58 One category of these “homegrown terrorism” cases
involve most often “young, vulnerable men with mental health or financial problems upon whom paid informants prey. Often, these informants
also play leading roles in concocting and implementing the fake terrorist plot.” 59 Ironically, for all the emphasis placed on rooting out the
“homegrown” terrorists in Muslim communities, Aziz argues that “[i]ndeed, Muslim communities know much less than law enforcement about
these cases because, unlike community members, law enforcement has information drawn from extensive surveillance networks and
intelligence databases at the local, state, and federal level.” 60 As
a result of this “[p]ervasive government scrutiny of
Muslim communities,” Muslims feel “pressured to downplay their religious identity” and “fear becoming
too active in . . . religious activities” because they worry that these are “indicative” to the government of
“terrorist inclinations.” 61 In a report prepared by the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition (MACLC), the Creating Law
Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), East Coast
Muslims were interviewed to assess their experiences with being a part of a community targeted by NYPD surveillance. Most interviewees
acknowledged that the public appearance of a Muslim identity would “invite[] unwanted attention or surveillance from law enforcement.” 62
Traditional or Islamic garb, a beard, a hijab (headscarf), or a niqaab (face covering) were such displays of
a Muslim identity which, to the NYPD, would “serve as indicators of ‘dangerousness.’” 63 Some Muslims
have stopped religious expression through praying in public, wearing headscarves, growing beards (an
Islamic tradition), or donning Islamic or “Muslim looking” garb.64 As one interviewee, an interfaith community
organizer, put it, “[a] hijab or beard isn’t just about being different and not fitting in . . . it’s also that people
will see me as [someone who is] prone to violence.” 65 One Muslim student attending Brooklyn College
said his parents forbid him from attending Muslim Student Association events on campus and wearing
the Islamic skullcap in public, out of fear of being openly identified as a Muslim based on
appearances.66 In addition, “[l]aw enforcement scrutiny of outward manifestations of ‘Muslim’
characteristics” prompted some Muslims to alter their appearances and the practice of their faith. 67 A
City University of New York (CUNY) student found that this scrutiny of outward Muslim appearances made some people
“water down” the practice of their religion, an unfortunate and unwarranted consequence of the
government surveillance.68 One professor at Baruch College stated that in a class discussion, her Muslim students told her that
participating in a Muslim Student Association could lead to law enforcement scrutiny and being labeled an extremist.69 These actions by
the government and the resulting response of fear by the Muslim community raise serious First
Amendment concerns, including the chilling of free association, which is considered an expressive right.
Implementing a form of guilt by association, government surveillance and law enforcement create a presumption that “Muslims . . . know more
about each other than other communities with members that have engaged in domestic terrorism.”
Recent guidelines have loopholes that justify profiling in the area of surveillance.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights 15, 2/24/15, “Re: Concerns with the
U.S. Department of Justice Guidance for Federal Law Enforcement Agencies Regarding the Use of Race,
Ethnicity, Gender, National Origin, Religion, Sexual Orientation, or Gender Identity”, Advocacy Letter to
President Barack Obama, http://www.civilrights.org/advocacy/letters/2015/profiling-guidanceconcerns.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/
Dear Mr. President, On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the 80 undersigned organizations, we are writing to
share our serious
concerns regarding the Guidance for Federal Law Enforcement Agencies Regarding the
Use of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, National Origin, Religion, Sexual Orientation, or Gender Identity (“the new
Guidance”), issued in December of 2014 by the Department of Justice (“DOJ”). While the new Guidance included much-needed improvements
to the 2003 Guidance Regarding the Use of Race by Federal Law Enforcement Agencies (“the 2003 Guidance”), many
issues regarding
the new Guidance remain. In particular, the new Guidance preserves loopholes from the 2003 Guidance
and fails to address critical matters regarding its implementation, ultimately impeding Attorney General
Eric Holder’s stated goal of eliminating discriminatory policing and profiling “once and for all.” We urge you to make
addressing these concerns a priority so that your administration’s final policy and legacy truly upholds fair and equal treatment for all. Crafted
under President George W. Bush and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, the 2003 Guidance was an important step forward in clarifying
the Department of Justice’s (“DOJ” or “the Department”) position on racial profiling in law enforcement. Following the tragic events of
September 11, 2001 and the initiation of our military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft
recognized that a federal directive was necessary in order to combat discriminatory law enforcement practices at home. Unfortunately,
the
2003 Guidance that resulted from their efforts failed to accomplish this goal fully. Specifically, the
Guidance failed to proscribe profiling on the basis of national origin or religion; included loopholes
allowing law enforcement to profile on national security and border integrity grounds; did not expand
the proscription on profiling to law enforcement surveillance activities; did not apply to state and local
law enforcement agencies that work with federal law enforcement or receive federal funding; and failed
to include enforcement mechanisms. Considering the events of this past year, now, more than ever, it is vitally
important for these shortcomings to be addressed. The shooting deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri and Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, and the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, all
at the hands of local police officers, along with the troubling pattern of unresolved cases of excessive
use of force perpetuated by Customs and Border Protection agents along the southern border, have
spurred a national movement calling for an end to discriminatory policing practices. The use of lethal
force by police in Ferguson and New York City are extreme examples of the type of racial profiling that
has occurred in those cities during traffic and pedestrian stops.[1]Both you and Attorney General Holder have spoken
candidly about your own personal experiences with racial profiling. With the proliferation of new technologies and
surveillance capabilities, state laws that target specific communities, and federal programs that involve
state and local law enforcement in civil immigration enforcement, we are at a critical juncture in our
nation’s history. We had hoped the new Guidance would make clear once and for all that our government would not tolerate
discriminatory policing practices. But, unfortunately, there are still serious flaws with the new Guidance, as indicated below: The new
Guidance preserves the loopholes that allow for profiling at the airports and in vast border regions by
excluding Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) and the Transportation Security Administration (“TSA”)
from its requirements. These loopholes allow federal agents to target and search travelers solely
because of their race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity.
The new Guidance also fails to prohibit the pervasive practice of singling out and stopping individuals on
suspected immigration violations for no reason other than baseless stereotypes. The new Guidance allows
law enforcement to continue directing sources and informants to spy on particular communities based
solely upon their protected characteristics—e.g., race, ethnicity or religion—regardless of any connection to
criminal activity. This coercive practice allows for the continued and discriminatory infiltration of First
Amendment protected spaces such as mosques or other houses of worship, and community
organizations or events by FBI agents or informants so that they may observe, take notes and collect
information, all without evidence of criminal activity. Allowing these practices to continue subjects
entire racial, ethnic and religious communities to potential surveillance by law enforcement, the chilling
effect of which cannot be overstated. For example, because of the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) Muslim spying program,
many Muslims are afraid to attend mosques for fear of being targeted by law enforcement informants
and officers. DOJ should announce a policy clarifying that this law enforcement practice violates the
stated goals of the Guidance and end this discriminatory practice.
The constant surveillance of Muslim communities is part of a larger cultural climate
that presumes Muslims to be guilty of terrorist activities purely by association
Smith 2012 (David Smith ,11 UCLA J. Islamic & Near E. L. 85 2012)
Since 9/11 the FBI has used a range of strategies to monitor or surveil the Muslim community. These
strategies include placing confidential informants in mosques, registering lawful immigrants from
predominately Muslim countries, mapping Muslim communities, and recruiting private individuals to
report suspicious behavior by Muslim or Muslim-appearing persons. These strategies share this common
theme: Islam itself is a threat. This theme captures the Post-9/11 national climate towards Muslim and
Muslim appearing individuals. In March 2011, for instance, Congress member Peter King, who chairs the Congressional Homeland
Security Committee, held a congressional hearing 65 focused only on the Muslim community. 66 In fact, King
emphasized, "I believe it will have more of an impact on the American people if they see people who are
of the Muslim faith and Arab descent testifying." 67 King believed that testimony would shed light on
Muslims' and the Muslim community's lack of cooperation with law enforcement. Specifically, testimony
would reveal that Muslim community members are ignoring the threat of radicalization within their own
community. King viewed any focus on other forms of violent extremism "as political correctness at its
worst."68 For example, King did not consider Jared Loughner's rampage in Arizona an equivalent national
security threat. 69 Loughner opened fire at Congresswoman Gifford's constituent meeting in Tucson, Arizona at a supermarket, 70 killing six
people and injuring seventeen others.71 King also declined to focus on the Oklahoma City bombing for the same
reason, 72 arguing that the hearing's purpose was to address al-Qa'ida's active "targeting [of] the
American Muslim community for recruitment."7 3 According to King's logic, al-Qa'ida targets Muslims in
the U.S. because Muslims are more likely than non-Muslims to be sympathetic to al-Qa'ida's message. The
current climate involves a presumption of guilt against Muslim and Muslim-appearing individuals. In
particular, when implementing these strategies, the government targets Muslim or Muslim-appearing individuals without
any facts indicating criminal or terrorist activity.
The cultural fear of Islam did not begin with 9/11 – it begins with the forging of a
unified western identity during the expulsion of Islam from western Europe –
philosophical justifications of western white supremacy used against indigenous
communities during colonization was also used to understand Islam as a race that
needed correction or extermination.
Grosfoguel et al ’06 Grosfoguel, Ramón and Mielants, Eric (2006) "The Long-Durée Entanglement
Between Islamophobia and Racism in the Modern/ Colonial Capitalist/Patriarchal World-System: An
Introduction," Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge: Vol. 5: Iss. 1, Article 2.
ISLAMOPHOBIA AS A FORM OF RACISM IN WORLD-HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE The challenge for our topic is to answer how it was possible that a
religious difference in the pre-modern/colonial world turned into a racial/ethnic difference in the modern/colonial world. In
the
heterarchical conceptualization of the world-system used here, Islamophobia would be the subalternization
and inferiorization of Islam produced by the Christian-centric religious hierarchy of the world-system
since the end of the 15th century. The year 1492 is a crucial foundational year for the understanding of
the present system. In this year, the Christian Spanish monarchy re-conquered Islamic Spain expelling Jews
and Arabs from the Spanish peninsula while simultaneously “discovering” the Americas and colonizing indigenous peoples. These
“internal” and “external” conquests of territories and people not only created an international division of labor of core and periphery, but also
constituted the internal and external imagined boundaries of Europe related to the global racial/ethnic hierarchy of the worldsystem,
privileging populations of European origin over the rest. Jews and Arabs became the subaltern internal
“Others” within Europe, while indigenous people became the external “Others” of Europe (Mignolo 2000). The first marker of
“otherness” in the “European/Euro-American Christian-Centric Capitalist/Patriarchal World-System”
was around religious identity. Jews and Arabs were characterized as “people with the wrong religion” while
indigenous people were constructed as “people without religion” (Maldonado-Torres 2006). In the global racial/ethnic hierarchy
produced by the two major events of 1492, the “people without religion,” that is “people without God,” were at
the bottom of the hierarchy, while “people with the wrong religion,” that is, “people with the wrong God,” occupied a different
position in this hierarchy. How did “people with the wrong religion” turn into “people below the human,” that is, racially inferior
people? The struggle of Christian Spain against Islam formed part of a long imperial struggle in the Mediterranean Sea that goes back to the
crusades. The
Christian vs. Islam struggle articulated what Walter Mignolo (2000) characterizes as the
“imperial difference,” while the post-1492 Spanish vs. Indigenous struggle in the Americas articulated the “colonial difference.” The
“imperial difference” after 1492 is the result of imperial relations between European empires versus Non-European Empires and we will
characterize it here as the result of the “imperial relation.” The “colonial difference” is the result of colonial relations between European and
non-European peoples and we will characterize it here as a result of the “colonial relation.”
Historically, the expulsion of Arabs
and Jews from Christian Spain in the name of “purity of blood” was a protoracist process (not yet fully racist,
although the consequences were not that different). “Purity of blood” was not used as a racial term but as a
technology of power to trace the religious ancestry of the population. However, “purity of blood” did
not become a fully racist perspective until much later and only after the application of the notion of the “purity of blood” to
indigenous peoples in the Americas. Indigenous peoples characterized in the late 15th and early 16th century as “people
without God” in the Christian Spanish imaginary became inferior sub-human or non-human beings. It is this inferiorization below the
“human,” to the level of animals, which turned indigenous peoples in the Americas into the first racialized subject of the
modern/colonial world inaugurated in 1492 (Dussel 1994). This racist imaginary was extended to new “people without God” such as subSaharan Africans transferred massively to the Americas as part of the European slave trade after the infamous debate
between
Sepulveda and Las Casas in the School of Salamanca in the 1550s. Sepulveda argued that indigenous
people had no soul and therefore were not humans and could be enslaved without representing a sin
in the eyes of God (Wallerstein 2006). While Las Casas argued that they were savages with a soul, that is
culturally inferior, childlike but ultimately humans to be Christianized rather than enslaved. Both
represent the initial formal articulation of the two forms of racism that continued for the next five
centuries. Sepulveda represented a biological racist discourse while Las Casas a cultural racist discourse. Las Casas argued that “Indians”
should be incorporated in the encomienda (a form of semi-feudal coerced labor) and called for Africans to replace them as slaves in the
plantations. After all, Africans were characterized by Las Casas not only as “people without religion” but also as “people without soul.” The
argument here is that the
racist imaginary that was built against the indigenous people of the new world was
then gradually extended to all non-European peoples starting with the African slave trade in the mid-16th century. The
important issue for our topic is how this racist imaginary was extended even to people that were characterized as “people with the wrong God”
in the late 15 century. As the European Empires’ relations with the Islamic Empires turned from an “imperial relation” into a “colonial relation”
(the Dutch colonization of Indonesia in the 17th century, the British colonization of India in the 18th century, the British colonization of the
Middle East in the 19th century, and the demise and subsequent division of the Ottoman Empire among several European empires at the end
of the First World War), the
notion of “people with the wrong God” in the Theological Christian imaginary of
the 16th and 17th centuries was secularized into a “scientific evolutionary hierarchical civilization”
imaginary that turned the late 15th century “people with the wrong religion” (imperial difference) into
the inferior “savages and primitives” of “people without civilization” (colonial difference) in the 19th century. The
latter represented a crucial transformation from the inferiorization of non-Christian religions (such as Islam,
Judaism, etc.) to the inferiorization of the human beings practicing those religions (such as Muslims and Jews). This
discursive mutation was central to the entanglement between the inferiorization of religion and the racism against non-European human
beings practicing those religions.
The Christian-centric global religious hierarchy and the Eurocentric global
racial/ethnic hierarchy were increasingly entangled and the distinction between practicing a nonChristian religion and being racialized as an inferior human became increasingly erased.
Western identity is privileged at an epistemic level by the production of knowledge
concerning an Other that does conform to the western standards of civilized life – This
prevents honest cross-cultural dialogues and justifies mass-scale racial violence.
Grosfoguel et al ’06 Grosfoguel, Ramón and Mielants, Eric (2006) "The Long-Durée Entanglement
Between Islamophobia and Racism in the Modern/ Colonial Capitalist/Patriarchal World-System: An
Introduction," Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge: Vol. 5: Iss. 1, Article 2.
Occidentalism created the epistemic privilege and hegemonic identity politics of the West from which to
judge and produce knowledge about the “Others.” The egopolitics of knowledge of Rene Descartes in the 17th
century where Western men replace God as the foundation of knowledge is the foundational basis of
modern Western philosophy. However as Enrique Dussel (1994), Latin American philosopher of liberation, reminds us, Descartes’
ego-cogito (“I think, therefore I am”) was preceded by 150 years of the ego-conquirus (“I conquer, therefore I am”). The God-eye view
defended by Descartes transferred the attributes of the Christian God to Western men (the gender here is not accidental). But this was only
possible from an Imperial Being, that is, from the panoptic gaze of someone who is at the center of the world because he has conquered it.
The myth about Western males’ capacity to produce a knowledge that is universal beyond time and
space was fundamental to imperial/global designs. The Cartesian egopolitics of knowledge inaugurated what Colombian
philosopher Santiago Castro-Gomez called the “point zero” perspective. The “point zero” perspective is the Western myth
of a point of view that assumes itself to be beyond a point of view. This myth allowed Western men to
claim their knowledge to be universal, neutral, value-free and objective. Contemporary authors like Samuel
Huntington (1996) reproduce a combination of old Occidentalism with Orientalism. The superiority of the West is taken for
granted and the epistemic privilege of Western identity politics from which to produce judgments of the
“Other” and global/imperial designs around the world is an unquestioned presupposition. Moreover, in
a male dominated academic culture such as Harvard, a scholar and national defense apologist such as
Huntington (2004) specifically links geopolitical concerns and security threats to ‘internal’ American
identity issues, most notably coming from those impoverished immigrants who may have the audacity
to challenge Western male privilege, socioeconomically, politically and ultimately epistemologically
(Etzioni 2005). What is the relevance of this epistemic discussion to Islamophobia? It is from Western hegemonic identity
politics and epistemic privilege that the ‘rest’ of the epistemologies and cosmologies in the world are
subalternized as myth, religion and folklore, and that the downgrading of any form of non-Western
knowledge occurs. The former leads to epistemic racism, that is, the inferiorization and subalternization
of non-Western knowledge, while the latter leads to Orientalism. It is also from this hegemonic epistemic location that Western
thinkers produce Orientalism about Islam. The subalternization and inferiorization of Islam were not merely a
downgrading of Islam as spirituality, but also as an epistemology. Islamic critical thinkers are considered
inferior to the Western/Christian thinkers. The superiority of Western epistemology allows the West to
construct with authority the Islamic “Other” as an inferior people or culture frozen in time, and leads
Western scholars to write entire books about what went wrong with Islam (e.g. Lewis 2002), as if problems in the
Middle East or poverty in In our view, it is more difficult for the West to swallow a moderate Islamic thinker critical of both Eurocentric
fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism than a declared Islamic fundamentalist thinker. The latter confirms all of the Orientalist
Islamophobic prejudices that the West constructs against Islam, while the former challenges those representations. This
is why both the
New York Times and Le Monde have dedicated front pages of their daily newspaper to the “Tariq
Ramadan affair.”4 All over Western Europe, Tariq Ramadan is very popular among Muslim European youngsters. His
message to Muslim youth is that you can be European and Muslim at the same time. This challenges one
of the most sacred myths of European identity politics, which is that in order to be European you have
to be Christian or secular (identified with Western thought and Christian cosmology/values even if you are not a believer). Moreover,
he calls Muslim youth to exercise their citizenship rights as Muslim Europeans and intervene in the
public sphere making claims for equality and contributions to the society. This has been too subversive
both for Islamic fundamentalists and for mainstream Eurocentric Europeans to accept (e.g. Fourest 2004; cf.
Bruckner 2007), hence the Islamophobic campaign against his thinking. Ever since he was banned from
France in the mid-1990s, the French newspaper Le Monde has been actively attacking Ramadan as an
Islamic fundamentalist that uses a “double discourse.” Later, when the ban was lifted, Le Monde’s campaign against
Ramadan’s “double language” nevertheless continued. What is interesting is the double standard and epistemic racism
behind this accusation. Those who promote it apply different rules of judgment when dealing with a European intellectual thinking
from Western tradition, than a European intellectual thinking from the Islamic tradition. An intellectual that is attacked as a
promoter of a “double discourse,” that is, accused that “what he/she says and writes is not really what
he/she believes,” has no way to defend himself/herself. The rule of judgment about the work of any
intellectual is based on what he/she says and writes. But if the accusation is that what she/he says and
writes are false because he/she has a “double discourse,” then there is no self-defense against this
accusation. Whatever the accused intellectual argues, it becomes tautological. No matter how many
times Tariq Ramadan has publicly denounced the oppression of women, terrorism and Islamic
fundamentalism, his brother’s fundamentalist views on Islam, Saudi Arabia and Taliban fundamentalist
views on Islam, suicide bombers and so on, Le Monde keeps attacking Tariq as a believer in these things
without any evidence nor serious reading of his work and public speeches because the claim is that he
has a “double discourse.” These standards of judgment are never applied to Western intellectuals. The
rare occasions that Muslims (and by extension Muslim intellectuals) are not presented in extremely
ambiguous terms, is when they happen to be ‘natives’ converted to Islam such as Ayyub Axel Koehler,
president of the Central Committee of Muslims in Germany, or Muslims such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2007)
who have abandoned or who consistently criticize Islam. The double standard shows that Islamophobia
forms part of Western epistemic racism. In sum, Islamophobia as a form of racism against Muslim people
is not only manifested in the labor market, education, public sphere, global war against terrorism or the
global economy, but also in the epistemological battleground about the definition of the priorities in the
world today.
Modern Islamophobia is not limited to domestic racial violence but justifies a militaristic
foreign policy against Islam. The rhetorical connection of Islam to fanatic and terroristic
violence has been deployed in every major military intervention in the Middle East
Semati ‘10 [Mehdi Semati, Mortimer House, 3/02/10, “ISLAMOPHOBIA, CULTURE AND RACE IN THE AGE
OF EMPIRE” vol no. 24, pg 256-275]
Although today’s major geopolitical concern is security/terrorism, other developments have contributed to the contemporary rise of the profile
of “Islam” in the West. The 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the 1970s Arab oil embargo, and the ensuing oil crisis were among these developments. The
‘vulnerability’ of the United States to Arab manipulation of ‘oil as weapon’ solidified the caricature of
Muslim Middle East as oil suppliers in the political and popular narratives. The next major development was the
Iranian revolution of 1979 led by Ayatollah Khomeini that culminated in the overthrow of American-backed monarchy in Iran. The
leader of the Iranian revolution was steadfast in his criticism of the United States for its support of the Iranian dictator. In this context,
another caricature of Muslims, mobs of chanting fanatics, was added to the list of negative images that
shape the discourse of Islam (Said 1981, p. 7). The next incident was the taking of American embassy employees as hostage by
radical students in Tehran. The episode, which lasted for 444 days, was an emotionally charged issue for American audiences. The publication
of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1988, and the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini against him, stirred passion and created violent
controversies throughout the world. The involvement
by the United States in the Gulf War in 1990 to remove
Saddam Hussein from Kuwait put the Middle East on the front pages once more. The first World Trade
Center bombing in 1993 was yet another development in this context. One of the striking elements of
the reaction to the bombing in 1993 was the degree to which Muslims in America were viewed as a
potential ‘network of sympathizers.’ 3 The Oklahoma City bombing raised the profile of Muslims in
America in the initial media coverage of the bombing. Countless terrorism ‘experts’ testified about ‘the sizable community
of Islamic fundamentalists in Oklahoma City,’ about the ‘earmarks of Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East,’ and about the parallels that have
‘roots in the Middle East.’ Before
the real perpetrators were caught, brown ‘men of Middle Eastern descent’
were being sought by media and authorities.4 Finally, the events of September 11, 2001, brought issues of
‘Islam,’ ‘Muslims,’ and the Middle East to the fore on a scale not seen previously. Today’s discourse of
Islam and Muslims is inextricably bound with the issue of terrorism, which tends to frame all other issues
concerning the Middle East. The present day notion of terrorism, however, has a relatively short history. The origin of today’s
terrorism discourse is located in the 1980s American foreign policy during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. This era has been
characterized as the era of aggressive militarism and a ruthless foreign policy as a response to the
perceived erosion of American power and standing in the international political arena. The preceding
presidency of Jimmy Carter had entailed events and policies that contributed to a real and perceived decline in America’s credibility as a
superpower. Those policies and events include the ‘loss’ of Nicaragua and Iran to revolutions with no sympathies towards America’s interests in
their respective regions, the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, a protracted hostage crisis in Iran and the failure to release those
hostages militarily, and President Carter’s emphasis on human rights. These policies and events, viewed as symptoms of a weakened America,
led to a call for a renewal of the projection of American power around the globe. A central theme of the Reagan presidency and its approach to
foreign policy was ‘resurgent America’ (Prince 1993). The call for projecting American power in this era required aggressive intervention policies
around the globe. To project American power around the globe the United States became involved in the invasion of Grenada, the sponsorship
of the Contra’s war in Nicaragua, the
bombing of Libya, and a host of other CIA’s secret wars and covert actions
around the world.5 This aggressive militarism, which culminated in the military operation in the Persian
Gulf in 1991, was part of a renewed Cold War by the Reagan administration to reassert American leadership after a
period of perceived decline. The major thrust of foreign policy in the 1980s was formulated in response to (perceived) Soviet Union
aggression. Accordingly, conflicts around the world were constructed ideologically as a struggle between the United States and the Soviet
Union (i.e. the free world versus the evil empire). The ideological struggle in this context, however, could not be won with the red scare of the
1950s, for anxieties about colossal communist takeover did not have the political resonance they had had in the 1950s. In
its place,
‘terrorism’ emerged as one of the most potent ideological signifiers of the era. In Prince’s (1992) view,
‘terrorism’ became ‘a term which functioned essentially as a synonym for communism but was sufficiently new and vivid that
it could carry a great deal of political freight, unlike the somewhat discredited anti-communism’ of an
earlier period (p. 31). The threat of terrorism, as ‘Russia’s secret weapon,’ thus became a major theme in the new Cold War, as reflected in
various mainstream media discourses of the period (Prince 1993). A cursory look at the popular narratives during this decade reveals the ways
in which the prevailing ideology of the era was worked into the popular films and was embodied in the heroic gestures of the celluloid heroes.
Films such as Red Dawn (1984), Invasion USA (1985), Rambo: First Blood Part 2 (1985), Rocky IV (1985), Rambo III (1986), and Top Gun (1986)
responded to, and embodied, the theme of resurgent America. They celebrated militarism, patriotism, and superior American military
the Hollywood films of the 1980s ‘nurtured this militarist mindset
and thus provided cultural representations that mobilized support’ for an aggressive foreign policy (p. 75).
Hollywood’s response to America’s ‘aggressive international posture,’ in Prince’s (1993) argument, was to
produce a ‘cycle of invasion-and-rescue films that collectively argued for the need to project strong
American military power overseas’ (p. 240). Drawing from the Cold War imagery, films such as Top Gun (1986) and Rambo II (1985)
technology and power. As Kellner (1995) argues,
‘dramatized heroic ideals of empire’ and depicted heroes that ‘functioned as personification of a national will and warrior spirit encoded by the
foreign policy rhetoric of the Reagan period’ (p. 240). This new Cold War in the context of a crumbling (and later disintegrated) Soviet Union
ushered in a new evil enemy. Thus,
enters the evil ‘Arab’ enemy. Films such as Delta Force (1986), Iron Eagle (1986), and Iron Eagle
II (1988) presented Arab ‘super enemy which eventually found its incarnation in Saddam Hussein and Iraq’ (Kellner 1995, p. 83).6 The same
Orientalist cultural worldview that produced such films provided the interpretive framework to render
intelligible the historical political conflict that was the Persian Gulf War. That worldview depicted Arabs
as backward, as savages (in the eternal struggle with our forces of civilization), and as incompetent (Prince
1993).7 The Otherness of the Muslim Other is sharpened beyond abstract foreign policy frameworks and fictional world of Hollywood
blockbuster fare with the events of 9/11.8 These
popular narratives provided the initial framework for the media
and state discourses that followed the events of 9/11 to facilitate the construction and intensification of
the generic category of ‘Arab-Middle Eastern-Muslim’ Other
Plan:
The United States federal government should require all relevant federal agencies
conducting surveillance of first amendment activities possess reasonable suspicion of
criminal activity excluding minor offenses and technical immigration offenses.
Contention 2: Solvency
The government can regulate federal surveillance practices by requiring that federal
agencies provide evidence of criminal activity before engaging in surveillance of first
amendment activities.
Fisher 4
Linda E. Fisher Nov. 5, 2004 (Assistant Professor in Residence at University of Connecticut) “GUILT BY EXPRESSIVE ASSOCIATION: POLITICAL
PROFILING, SURVEILLANCE AND THE PRIVACY OF GROUPS” ARIZONA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 46:621
: a particular situation will be presumed not to
involve a sufficiently compelling state interest if there is no reasonable suspicion of criminal activity
before a full investigation of First Amendment activity is conducted.221 Criminal activity should be defined
to exclude minor offenses such as violations of municipal ordinances, technical misdemeanors—such as
minor traffic code offenses—or technical immigration offenses.222 If there is no indication of unlawful
activity, full investigations are not permitted; the presumption is irrebuttable, although I also propose an emergency exception. This standard
is an appropriate alternative to political or religious profiling, as it permits legitimate law enforcement
while disallowing investigations based purely on politics, which contravene the First Amendment. Its deployment would
eliminate virtually all of the abuses that have occurred in the past, as detailed in Section I, supra. At the same time, terrorism
investigations that focus on meaningful evidence of terrorism can proceed unimpeded. This presumption also
In the political surveillance context, the application of balancing should result in a threshold presumption
represents a conclusion that political surveillance will, on balance, be harmful and intrusive with an insignificant likelihood of gain in useful intelligence if the initial evidentiary standard is not
, the general compelling state interest in investigating terrorism does not exist sufficiently
in a particular case when evidence of criminality is lacking; mere suspicion or political profiling cannot justify intrusions into a group’s private
affairs. Thus, the generalized compelling need to uncover terrorist activities does not constitute a sufficient
reason to surveil a particular mosque unless there is a reasonable suspicion of criminality at that
particular mosque, such as that the imam preaches extremist doctrine and raises funds for what appears to be an affiliate of a terrorist organization.224 It is not acceptable to
met.223 Stated differently
investigate and compile dossiers on all mosques holding radical views, even if the surveillance is limited to mosques whose members come from countries that have produced terrorists, such
The standard of reasonable suspicion for political surveillance is similar to, and borrowed
from, the Fourth Amendment standard employed in criminal procedure226 to determine the constitutionality of a stop-and-frisk
as Saudi Arabia.225
situation. I adopt it here because it provides a suitable delineation point between political surveillance and legitimate law enforcement. In order for a stop-and-frisk investigation to be lawful, a
police officer must “reasonably . . . conclude in light of his experience that criminal activity may be afoot”227 and “point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational
inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant” a search.228 Recognizing the public safety interest in thwarting crimes before they occur, this standard is lower than the probable cause
standard required for a police officer to actually make an arrest.229 What constitutes reasonable suspicion in a particular situation depends upon “whether a reasonably prudent [person] in
, reasonable
suspicion never exists based on mere “hunch[es]” or general suspicion.231 Rather, police “must have a
particularized and objective basis for suspecting [that] the particular person” being investigated has
committed or plans to commit a crime.232 In a First Amendment context, the standard should not be interpreted identically to the reasonable suspicion
the circumstances would be warranted in the belief that his safety or that of others was in danger.”230 While this is a somewhat nebulous determination
standard employed in a pure Fourth Amendment situation where no expressive activity is involved. Courts have developed a number of “special needs” exceptions to the pure Fourth
Amendment standard.233 Those exceptions must be limited where First Amendment rights implicated, because most courts likely would consider prevention of terrorism a “special need” in
. In order to preserve fragile First Amendment rights, the scope of the
exceptions should be confined. Further, even if the Fourth Amendment’s special needs doctrine applies, the existence of a special need is not always dispositive. In
situations not involving First Amendment expression
some respects, this situation is analogous to that in Ferguson v. City of Charleston, 234 one of the Supreme Court’s most recent pronouncements on the special needs exception. In that case,
the Court balanced the state interest in conducting drug testing on pregnant women to prevent fetal drug abuse against the women’s interest in avoiding dissemination of personal—and
potentially incriminating—information to law enforcement. Striking down the drug testing policy, the Court held it unconstitutional because “the gravity of the threat alone cannot be
dispositive of questions concerning what means law enforcement officers may employ to pursue a given purpose.”235 A policy designed to obtain information for criminal prosecution by
the fundamental right to engage in First Amendment-based
association should override the State’s interest in having free rein to monitor all group activity whenever
any suspicion of terrorism arises. Given the risk of misuse of religious and political information, as well as of
disruption of organizational functioning, the end does not justify the means .236 There is ample precedent for adopting a
reasonable suspicion of criminality standard for political surveillance. This standard remains as a
requirement for police departments accepting federal aid.237 Its substantial equivalent was successfully employed in the FBI’s domestic
means of nonconsensual drug-testing is draconian. Analogously,
surveillance guidelines for over twenty-five years.238 It was also incorporated into the Chicago Red Squad consent decree.239 The Church Committee endorsed the reasonable suspicion
standard as a predicate for terrorism investigations in 1976.240 Notably, it was recently adopted in the Denver police spying consent decree.241 And it was enacted in a Seattle ordinance.242
Other political surveillance litigation was not as successful.243 However, the Dale Court’s affirmation of a robust right of association strengthens and reinforces those First Amendment
reasonable suspicion is a relatively lenient evidentiary standard that allows
legitimate law enforcement activity.244 Absent even this indicia of crime, it is difficult to imagine—outside of an imminent threat of serious violence—how the
arguments previously available. Additionally,
government could present a state interest sufficiently compelling to ever outweigh harm to First Amendment rights. A lower standard would unduly interfere with the integrity of associations
and contravene the Supreme Court’s many pronouncements concerning the centrality of associational rights to preservation of the First Amendment.245 And the standard does not apply at all
to investigations not based on First Amendment conduct, such as investigation of an individual because of his purchase of explosives. Indeed, one could readily question whether the
the need to investigate terrorism where evidence
of crime exists does not permit imposition of a higher standard, such as probable cause.246 The purpose
of the investigation is to obtain probable cause. That standard is the result of an investigation, rather
than its predicate. While the reasonable suspicion standard is a relatively low threshold, it is effective. The history of political surveillance
reveals that almost all of the abuses could have been avoided had a reasonable suspicion threshold
been observed.247 Requiring reasonable, articulable evidence of crime prevents investigations based on
pure politics, mere whim, or baseless suspicion.248 Its use should practically eliminate political profiling.
reasonable suspicion standard is sufficiently high to deter excessive, unnecessary surveillance. But
In opposition to this standard, Attorney General Ashcroft argues that only an investigation can uncover evidence, and that a standard requiring prior evidence therefore undermines law
enforcement by prohibiting the very process that compiles relevant evidence in the first place.249 His logic is superficially appealing, but ultimately unpersuasive; in reality, surveillance is only
conducted when a reason or suspicion triggers it. Resource limitations prevent either random or total surveillance; thus, investigations are begun for a reason. Historically, illegitimate reasons
such as dissident political views have frequently triggered investigations.250 By contrast, this standard requires that the inevitable triggering reason must reasonably relate to criminal
in certain circumstances where the need is exceptionally compelling, brief preliminary inquiries
using a lower threshold may be conducted. True terrorist emergencies may occasionally necessitate
immediate investigation of First Amendment conduct with less than an individualized reasonable
suspicion of crime.251 I propose the standard recommended by the Church Committee: “The FBI should be permitted to conduct a
preliminary preventive intelligence investigation . . . where it has a specific allegation or specific or
substantiated information that the [subject(s)] will soon engage in terrorist activity.”252 Where the First Amendment is
implicated, exceptions to the reasonable suspicion threshold should be limited to situations involving a
serious risk of imminent violence, to avoid swallowing the reasonable suspicion threshold with an
exception invoked any time an officer suspects terrorism.253 The need to protect First Amendment activity requires the qualification, as well as
behavior. Finally,
durational limits and approval by high-ranking personnel.254 Advocacy of specific terrorist violence in the U.S. could meet the terrorist emergency definition in some situations and lead to a
preliminary inquiry, but only to determine if the advocacy constitutes a real threat. To hold otherwise would disable law enforcement from dealing with the likely prospect of severe and
. It is important, however, that this exception be limited by
additional restrictions to ensure that the emergency authority is not misused. For instance, use of
infiltrators or electronic surveillance could be prohibited.255 The underlying principle is that the
intrusiveness of the inquiry must be proportional to the threat presented.
imminent danger solely because First Amendment activity is involved
Policy makers must include the critique. This does not indicate the need to stop the
critique after legislation or a validation of the term ‘terrorist’ but rather must include
voices from the state and ‘terrorists’.
Gunning 7
Jeroen Gunning. Gunning is deputy director of the Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and
Contemporary Political Violence at the University of Wales. “A Case for Critical Terrorism Studies?”,
Government and Opposition, Volume 42, Issue 3, pages 387–390, Summer 2007,
The notion of emancipation also crystallizes the need for policy engagement. For, unless
a ‘critical’ field seeks to be policy
relevant, which, as Cox rightly observes, means combining ‘critical’ and ‘problem-solving’ approaches, it does
not fulfil its ‘emancipatory’ potential.94 One of the temptations of ‘critical’ approaches is to remain
mired in critique and deconstruction without moving beyond this to reconstruction and policy
relevance.95 Vital as such critiques are, the challenge of a critically constituted field is also to engage with policy
makers – and ‘terrorists’ – and work towards the realization of new paradigms, new practices, and a
transformation, however modestly, of political structures. That, after all, is the original meaning of the
notion of ‘immanent critique’ that has historically underpinned the ‘critical’ project and which, in Booth’s
words, involves ‘the discovery of the latent potentials in situations on which to build political and social
progress’, as opposed to putting forward utopian arguments that are not realizable. Or, as Booth wryly observes, ‘this means
building with one’s feet firmly on the ground, not constructing castles in the air’ and asking ‘what it
means for real people in real places’.96 Rather than simply critiquing the status quo, or noting the problems that
come from an un-problematized acceptance of the state, a ‘critical’ approach must, in my view, also concern itself with
offering concrete alternatives. Even while historicizing the state and oppositional violence, and challenging the state’s role in
reproducing oppositional violence, it must wrestle with the fact that ‘the concept of the modern state and sovereignty embodies a coherent
response to many of the central problems of political life’, and in particular to ‘the place of violence in political life’. Even while
‘deessentializing and deconstructing claims about security’, it must concern itself with ‘how security is to be
redefined’, and in particular on what theoretical basis.97 Whether because those critical of the status quo are wary of becoming co-opted
by the structures of power (and their emphasis on instrumental rationality),98 or because policy makers have, for obvious reasons (including
the failure of many ‘critical’ scholars to offer policy relevant advice), a greater affinity with ‘traditional’ scholars, the role of ‘expert adviser’ is
more often than not filled by ‘traditional’ scholars.99 The
result is that policy makers are insuffi- ciently challenged to
question the basis of their policies and develop new policies based on immanent critiques. A notable
exception is the readiness of European Union officials to enlist the services of both ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ scholars to advise the EU on how
better to understand processes of radicalization.100 But this would have been impossible if more critically oriented scholars such as Horgan
and Silke had not been ready to cooperate with the EU. Striving
to be policy relevant does not mean that one has to
accept the validity of the term ‘terrorism’ or stop investigating the political interests behind it. Nor does
it mean that each piece of research must have policy relevance or that one has to limit one’s research to
what is relevant for the state, since the ‘critical turn’ implies a move beyond state-centric perspectives.
End-users could, and should, thus include both state and non-state actors such as the Foreign Office and the Muslim
Council of Britain and Hizb ut-Tahrir; the Northern Ireland Office and the IRA and the Ulster Unionists; the Israeli government and Hamas and
Fatah (as long as the overarching principle is to reduce the political use of terror, whoever the perpetrator).
It does mean, though,
that a critically constituted field must work hard to bring together all the fragmented voices from
beyond the ‘terrorism field’, to maximize both the field’s rigour and its policy relevance. Whether a critically
constituted ‘terrorism studies’ will attract the fragmented voices from outside the field depends largely on how broadly the term ‘critical’ is
defined. Those who assume ‘critical’ to mean ‘Critical Theory’ or ‘poststructuralist’ may not feel comfortable identifying with it if they do not
themselves subscribe to such a narrowly defined ‘critical’ approach. Rather, to maximize its inclusiveness,
I would follow Williams
and Krause’s approach to ‘critical security studies’, which they define simply as bringing together ‘many perspectives that
have been considered outside of the mainstream of the discipline’.101 This means refraining from establishing new criteria
of inclusion/exclusion beyond the (normative) expectation that scholars self-reflexively question their conceptual framework, the
origins of this framework, their methodologies and dichotomies; and that they historicize both the state and ‘terrorism’, and
consider the security and context of all, which implies among other things an attempt at empathy and
cross-cultural understandingnn.102
Countering Islamophobic rhetoric requires demystifying the common held association
of Muslisms being affiliated with terrorism. However, it is also necessary to support
and engage in critical approaches that recognize Islamophobia as part of a larger
apparatus of oppression with institutional support.
Zine in 2004(Jasmin, teaches graduate courses in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in
Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, “AntiIslamophobia Education as Transformative Pedadogy: Reflections from the Educational Front Lines,” The
American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 21:3)
As an anti-racism scholar and educator, fellow colleagues and I realized from as early as September 12 that there
was an urgency to
frame a critical pedagogical response to address and challenge the rampant Islamophobia affecting the
realities of Muslims from all walks of life and social conditions. Among the most vulnerable were children and youth,
who received little support from schools in dealing with the backlash that many were experiencing on a routine basis. Most schools were
reluctant to engage in any response beyond the politically neutral arena of “crisis management.” Among
the school districts that I was in contact with, there was a clear resistance to addressing or even naming issues of
racism and Islamophobia. In fact, the discursive language to name and define the experiences that Muslims were encountering on a
day-to-day basis did not even exist within the educational discourse. While schools were reluctant to name specific
incidents as racism – part of an all-too-common denial – the notion of “Islamophobia” did not have any currency
at all. In fact, it was not a part of the language or conceptual constructs commonly used by educators, even by those committed to
multicultural and antiracist pedagogy. I realized the urgency to map a new epistemological and pedagogical terrain by creating an educational
framework for addressing Islamophobia. Within the existing equity-based educational frameworks, one could find the conceptual and
pedagogical tools to address issues of racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and anti-Semitism. However, the
discursive
foundations for dealing with Islamophobia and the accompanying educational resources simply did not
exist. Developing a new framework to fill this gap involved coining a new term: “Anti-Islamophobia Education.” Being able to name
and define the experience of Muslims as the result of Islamophobia was critical to shaping the kind of interventions that would take place from
a critical educational standpoint. Before outlining a methodology for conducting anti-Islamophobia education, it
was necessary to
develop some discursive foundations, arrive at a definition of Islamophobia, and create an understanding of what it was that we
sought to challenge and resist. From a socio-psychological standpoint, the notion of Islamophobia is often loosely
translated as an “attitude of fear, mistrust, or hatred of Islam and its adherents.” However, this definition
presents a narrow conceptual framework and does not take into account the social, structural, and ideological
dimensions through which forms of oppression are operationalized and enacted. Applying a more holistic
analysis, far from being based on mere “ignorance,” Islamophobic attitudes are, in fact, part of a rational system of
power and domination that manifests as individual, ideological, and systemic forms of discrimination
and oppression. The idea that discrimination, be it based on race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, or religion, simply stems from
“ignorance” allows those engaged in oppressive acts and policies to claim a space of innocence. By labeling Islamophobia as an
essentially “irrational” fear, this conception denies the logic and rationality of social dominance and
oppression, which operates on multiple social, ideological, and systemic levels. Therefore, to capture the complex dimensions through
which Islamophobia operates, it is necessary to extend the definition from its limited conception as a “fear and
hatred of Islam and Muslims” and acknowledge that these attitudes are intrinsically linked to individual,
ideological, and systemic forms of oppression that support the logic and rationale of specific power relations. For example,
individual acts of oppression include such practices as name-calling or personal assault, while systemic forms of oppression refer
to the structural conditions of inequality regulated through such institutional practices as racial profiling
or denying jobs or housing opportunities. These exclusionary practices are shored up by specific
ideological underpinnings, among them the purveyed notions designed to pathologize Muslims as
“terrorists” and impending threats to public safety. Understanding the dimensions of how systems of oppression such as Islamophobia
operate socially, ideologically, and systemically became a key component of developing educational tools that would help build the critical skills
needed to analyze and challenge these dynamics. From a discursive standpoint, I locate
anti-Islamophobia education within a
integrative anti-racism framework5 that views systems of oppression based on race, class, gender,
sexuality, ability, and religion as part of a multiple and interlocking nexus that reinforce and sustain one
another. Based on this understanding, I have mapped some key epistemological foundations for anti-Islamophobia education.6 This
includes the need to “reclaim the stage” through which Islam is represented from the specter of
terrorists and suicide bombers to a platform of peace and social justice. “Reclaiming the stage” requires
adopting a pedagogical approach that shifts the popular media discourse away from the negative,
essentialized referents and tropes of abject “Otherness” ascribed to Muslims. This move involves
presenting a critical counter-narrative in order to reframe the Manichean worldview and “clash of
civilizations” narratives typically being purveyed in order to present a more nuanced, reasoned, and critical perspective of the
global sociopolitical realities that Muslim individuals and societies are confronting, engaging, and challenging. Another foundational
aspect of anti-Islamophobia education involves interrogating the systemic mechanisms through which
Islamophobia is reinforced, by analytically unraveling the dynamics of power in society that sustain
social inequality. Racial profiling, which targets groups on the basis of their race, ethnicity, faith, or other
aspects of social difference, and similar issues are major systemic barriers that criminalize and
pathologize entire communities. In schools, the practice of “color-coded streaming,” whereby a disproportionate number of racially
and ethnically marginalized youth are channeled into lower non-academic level streams, is another example of institutionalized racism.
Negative perceptions held by teachers and guidance counselors toward racialized students have often led to assumptions of failure or limited
chances for success, based on such false stereotypes as the notion that “Islam doesn’t value education for girls” or “Black students won’t
succeed.” These
negative attitudes are relayed to students through the “hidden curriculum” of schooling
and lead to lower expectations being placed upon youth from specific communities.7 Developing critical
pedagogical tools to analyze and develop challenges to these systems of domination is part of building a
transformative and liberatory pedagogy, one geared toward achieving greater social justice in both schools and society.
Another key goal of anti-Islamophobia education involves the need to demystify stereotypes. Since 9/11,
renewed Orientalist constructions of difference have permeated the representation of Muslims in media
and popular culture. Images of fanatical terrorists and burqa-clad women are seen as the primary
markers of the Muslim world. Deconstructing and demystifying these stereotypes is vital to helping
students develop a critical literacy of the politics of media and image-making. Critically examining the destructive
impact of how these images create the social and ideological divide between “us” and “them” is important to exposing how power operates
through the politics of representation.
Inherency
Surveillance Now
Targets Muslims
The government uses racial profiling programs- they use a revamped COINTELPRO to
spy on muslims
Murray in 10 (Nancy, “Profiling in the age of total information awareness”, Race & Class Copyright ©
2010 Institute of Race Relations, Vol. 52(2): 3–24 10.1177/0306396810377002 http://rac.sagepub.com)
The New York Police Department (NYPD), which now has a global ‘antiterror’ presence and has led the charge
against ‘homegrown terrorism’ since the publication of its 2007 report, Radicalization in the West: the homegrown threat, is
paying special attention to its communities of colour. It has created a ‘stop and frisk’ database for
information collected from the two million people it has subjected to street searches over the last five
years. The New York Civil Liberties Union has reports that, in 2009 alone, the NYPD conducted 575,304 ‘stop and frisk’
searches, 88 per cent of which revealed no criminal activity. More than half of those targeted in 2009 were African
American and 31 per cent were Latino. So secretive is the emerging intelligence network that there is no way of conducting quality control and
finding out exactly what information is being gathered, mined and disseminated. Leaks
of information that have occurred from
fusion centres in Maryland, Virginia, Texas, Missouri and other states suggest that the mindset of
COINTELPRO has been enhanced with twenty-first century technology to enable alerts about reputed
‘terrorist threats’ to be widely shared among scores of different agencies in near real-time. Revealed in
the leaked material is the widespread infiltration and monitoring of anti-war groups, environmental groups, anti-death
penalty groups, Muslim groups, and ‘Black Extremists’, to mention a few.31 The information that has been collected and
shared is riddled with inaccuracies – but how can it be corrected given its broad dispersal through
cyberspace?
The threat of terrorism from non-state actors is incredibly low-the over exaggerated
terrorist threat portrayed in today’s literature is used to justify domestic surveillance
Jackson in 2/14/08 (Richard, “The Study of Terrorism after 11 September 2001: Problems, Challenges
and Future Developments”, Political Studies Review, volume: 7, p. 171.184)
The vast majority of terrorism studies are predicated on, or at the very least, take for granted, the
notion that terrorism
represents one of the main threats facing states today. This is certainly the case with several of the books under review
here (see Bar, 2006; Nesi, 2006;Sloan, 2006). Some terrorism scholars go so far as to suggest that terrorism is the
premier international security threat today (Sageman, 2004, p. vii), and that it threatens the existence of the
entire international system (Mendelsohn, 2005, p. 45).Two aspects in particular are troubling about this
situation. First, it is disappointing from a scholarly perspective that so few terrorism scholars make the
effort to question or 174 RICHARD JACKSON© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Political Studies Association Political
Studies Review: 2009, 7(2) investigate the evidentiary basis of this popular narrative. If they did, they would
note that there has in fact been a decrease in terrorist incidents over the past two decades, global
terrorism-related deaths average no more than a few hundred per year and, in contrast to the tens of
millions killed by disease, small arms, state repression, famine, automobile accidents, global warming, crime, natural
disasters and numerous other phenomena, terrorism ranks extremely low as a risk to personal safety
(Goodin, 2006, pp. 111–23; see also Jackson, 2007b; Mueller, 2005).They would also note that the preponderance of evidence
suggests that the likelihood of terrorists deploying weapons of mass destruction is minuscule, given the
not insignificant technical, strategic and political obstacles to their use (see Jenkins, 1998; Mueller, 2006; Sprinzak,
1998); that no state or society has ever been existentially threatened by acts of terrorism alone; and it is a
gross simplification to assume that contemporary ‘religious terrorists’ are less discriminating than the
ideological and nationalist terrorists of yesteryear (Jackson, 2007a). Refusing to reproduce or reinforce inaccurate and
alarmist depictions of the current threat facing Western countries would go a long way to restoring academic credibility in the field – as well as
providing a much-needed degree of perspective to public debates and political deliberations. Second,
it is especially troubling that
terrorism scholars lack any awareness of the ways in which the massively over-exaggerated terrorist
threat (which they have in part helped to authoritatively construct as ‘real’) is used politically to
legitimise a range of external and domestic political projects, many of which are of dubious efficacy or
legitimacy. For example, the purported existential and ubiquitous threat posed by contemporary
‘Islamist’ terrorists has been used to justify foreign invasion and war, the use of torture, extraordinary
rendition, the Guantánamo detentions, extra-judicial assassinations or ‘targeted killings’, military
assistance to non-democratic regimes, domestic surveillance, shoot-to-kill policies, identity cards,
expansion of the security services, increased military spending and the like(Jackson, 2007b).
The government use many strategies to make Muslims out to be potential suspects
even in the absence of wrongdoing
Smith 2012 (David Smith ,11 UCLA J. Islamic & Near E. L. 85 2012)
In addition to using informants, the government
has used additional strategies that show its view of Muslims as
potential suspects even in the absence of wrongdoing. The use of informants is merely an extension of Post-9/11 strategies
targeting Muslim and Muslim-appearing individuals and communities. Shortly after 9/11, for example, the FBI monitored randomly
chosen mosques for nuclear activity.184 No evidence indicated the presence of terrorists or terrorist
activity at these surveilled mosques.185 Similarly, between 2002 and 2003, the federal government required male
noncitizens from Arab and Muslim countries to register with the Immigration and Nationality Service.186
Federal agents photographed, fingerprinted, and interviewed approximately 83,000 individuals who were registered under this program.' 87
Religious identity and nationality-that is, nationality as a proxy for religious identity since the countries
identified in the registry program were predominately Muslim countries-were the only reason why
individuals were required to register.' Eventually, the FBI abandoned the registry; its own agents grew
frustrated with the program because its broad-based investigations wasted time and produced few, if any,
leads.189 That these agents viewed the program as unsuccessful further shows that the government possessed no particular reason other
than religious association to require these noncitizens to register. In 2003, the federal government also initiated "Operation Liberty Shield."
Operation Liberty Shield authorized government officials to detain any noncitizen seeking asylum if the
noncitizen came from a "nation[ ] where al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda sympathizers, and other terrorist groups are
known to have operated."190 Most if not all of these countries were predominately Muslim. 19 1 Like the registry program, DHS'
Operation Liberty Shield singled out Middle Eastern individuals based on suspected religious identity. 192 As another example, soon after
9/11 former Attorney General John Ashcroft attempted to implement the Terrorism Information and
Prevention System ("TIPS").193 That program sought to recruit mail carriers, truckers, meter readers, and virtually any
employee with access to a person's private residence as unpaid government informants.194 These
informants would then report suspicious activity to the federal government.195 The government
discarded TIPS due to public pressure. 196 TIPS included several dangers, including the fact that the
program failed to define "suspicious activity."l 97 Consequently, TIPS had greater potential to document
public prejudice than to produce leads and information related to national security threats.198 Eventually,
however, TIPS was revived, albeit under a different name. In July, 2010, the Department of Homeland Security ("DHS") announced its "See
Something, Say SomethingTM" campaign.199 "See Something, Say Somethinge" encourages individuals and businesses to report suspicious
program encourages persons to report behavior, not racial or ethnic characteristics. 201
However, "See Something, Say SomethingTM" still has the same problem as TIPS. Just like in TIPS, the government
has no control about the degree to which racial or ethnic prejudice determines the characterization of a
given behavior as "suspicious." Seemingly harmless behavior, such as talking on the phone or taking a
activity. 2m According to DHS, the
photograph, can become suspicious if performed by someone who appears Muslim. TIPS has further been
revived within Fusion Centers. Fusion Centers are institutions that combine state and federal resources to
gather, analyze and share information to prevent terrorism. 20 2 Most local agencies, including fire departments, local
police, public health agencies, private security personnel, and sometimes private businesses provide information to
Fusion Centers, facilities where intelligence analysts from local and federal agencies evaluate tips and other information. 203 Additionally,
Fusion Centers can include partnerships between the government and private businesses. 2 0 4 Fusion
Centers take suspicious activity reporting and combine it with context-specific information related to a
locality to create intelligence. 2 05 Fusion Centers then share this information with local and federal law enforcement agencies. 2
06 In other words, just like TIPS, Fusion Centers gather, share and process racially motivated tips and allegations of
information reported to law enforcement agencies.
FBI spying on men with Muslim heritage without any individualized suspicion
Harris in 2014 (Shane, Senior Staff Writer at Foreign Policy, “The FBI’s Dirty Little Secret, The NSA
wasn't the only one snooping on ordinary Americans.”, Foreign Policy,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/07/09/the-fbis-dirty-little-secret/)
Believe it or not, some
officials at the National Security Agency are breathing a sigh of relief over Glenn
Greenwald’s new exposé on the government’s secret surveillance of U.S. citizens. That’s because it’s the
FBI that finds itself in the cross-hairs now, in a story that identifies by name five men, including prominent
Muslim American civil rights activists and lawyers, whose emails were monitored by the FBI using a law meant to
target suspected terrorists and spies. The targets of the spying allege that they were singled out because
of their race, religion, and political views — accusations that, if true, would amount to the biggest
domestic intelligence scandal in a generation and eclipse any of the prior year’s revelations from
documents provided by leaker Edward Snowden. Ever since the 9/11 attacks, the FBI has been frequently cast as the judicious and
measured army of the war on terror, the home to interrogation experts who know how to coax secrets out of detained terrorists without
resorting to the "enhanced techniques" of the CIA. But now,
the FBI, and with it the Justice Department, finds itself
exposed for spying on Americans who were never accused of any crime, and in the position of having to defend and
explain its reasoning for taking that intrusive step. Greenwald’s story is based on a spreadsheet purportedly compiled by the NSA showing
individual surveillance targets, identified by their email addresses. (The government has neither confirmed nor denied the document’s
authenticity.) NSA
technology and personnel were undoubtedly used to monitor the targets’ email
accounts, but the spreadsheet calls the FBI the "responsible agency" for surveilling the five men named
in the story — as it would be for any targets located inside the United States. All five, including an
Iranian-American professor at Rutgers University and a prominent Muslim civil liberties leader, told the
Intercept that they deny any involvement with terrorists or spies. None has been accused of terrorism,
espionage, or any other crime. One, Faisal Gill, even held a senior position at the Department of Homeland Security in George W.
Bush’s administration and was granted a government security clearance. What they do have in common is their Muslim
heritage and Middle Eastern or South Asian extraction. And some of the men say that’s precisely why
they were targeted. "[T]he FBI has been mapping a broad spectrum of communities, including American
Muslim communities, the African American community and Latino American communities, without any
basis for individualized suspicion," the Council on American-Islamic Relations, whose executive director, Nihad
Awad, was among the five men reportedly spied on by the FBI, wrote in a letter, co-signed by numerous civil rights groups, to President
Barack Obama on Wednesday, July 9.
No prohibition exists against the use of religion or political affiliation to engage in
profiling during surveillance – this is part of a larger network of institutionalized
racism towards Arabs and Muslims
Kumar in 2012(Deepa, associate professor of media studies and Middle Eastern studies at Rutgers
University, “Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire,” Page 140-144)
While racism against Arabs and Muslims has a long history in the United States, legalized persecution
against them took institutional form in the early 1970s. The overarching context was the Arab-Israeli conflict, the growth
of the PLO, and the use of armed struggle in the pursuit of national liberation. As we saw in previous chapters, the association of the
enemies of Israel with “terrorism” began around this time. One of the first legal manifestations of this logic in the United
States occurred after an infamous incident at the 1972 Munich Olympics in which a group of Palestinians took Israeli athletes hostage and
murdered them. In response, the Nixon administration launched “Operation Boulder,” giving law enforcement agencies “carte blanche
authorization to investigate individuals of Arabic-speaking origin, whether citizen or not, allegedly to determine their possible and/or potential
relationship with ‘terrorist’ activities related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.”7Thus, a violent
act committed in Munich by a
handful of Palestinians became the basis on which all Arabs were designated as suspicious and therefore
worthy of investigation. Elaine Hagopian writes that Zionist intelligence sources were associated with the operation. So it is not
surprising that Arabs were targeted, despite the fact that it was the Jewish Defense League (JDL) that had committed known and verified acts of
terrorism in the United States. In fact, according to a Rand Corporation study, JDL was one of the most active terrorist groups (as classified by
the FBI) for more than a decade.8 Yet it was Arabs who were automatically suspected of “terrorist” activities. After the Iran hostage crisis,
President Carter took similar measures against Iranians in the United States.
Such activities to combat “terrorism” continued
under Reagan. The elder Bush launched a surveillance program against Arab Americans in 1991, in the
context of the first GulfWar. The FBI interrogated Muslim leaders as well as activists, including antiwar
demonstrators. The DOJ required Arab residents and immigrants to submit to fingerprinting, and the Federal Aviation Administration
devised a system of racial profiling.9The two International Counterterrorism conferences that took place in 1979 and 1984, discussed in the
previous chapter, no doubt contributed to a climate in which Arabs were increasingly being profiled as terrorists in the 1980s and leading up to
the 1990s. Under
Bill Clinton in 1996, Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act
(AEDPA), which, among other things, made it legal to deport immigrants—or, in the lurid language of
AEDPA, “alien terrorists”—based on secret evidence. In 1995, when white right-wing Christian terrorist Timothy
McVeigh bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, the existing “terrorism” hysteria generated after
the 1993 WTC attempted bombing ensured that Arabs and Muslims were immediately blamed. Steve Emerson, an
Islamophobic warrior (more on him in chapter 10), told CBS News that the bombing had been “done with the intent to inflict as many casualties
as possible,” which he claimed was a “Middle Eastern trait.”10In short,
even before the events of 9/11, the groundwork
had been laid for the legalized targeting of Muslims and Arabs. As critical race theorist Ian F. Haney Lopez explains, the
legal system is not a neutral body that operates above and outside of society. Instead, “the law serves
not only to reflect but to solidify social prejudice, making law a prime instrument in the construction and
reinforcement of racial subordination.”11 The events of 9/11 brought the legal apparatus into
conjunction with the foreign policy establishment. Now, the terrorist enemy would be fought both abroad
and at home. Immediately after the attacks, about 1,200 Muslim citizens and noncitizens, most of them
Arab and South Asian, were rounded up, summarily arrested, and questioned by the FBI, the Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS, now known as ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and various state and local law enforcement agencies.
They were detained for varying periods of time, often in solitary confinement, and with a shroud of secrecy surrounding the whole affair. Not
one of these people was found to be a “terrorist” or to have any link whatsoever to the attacks on September 11th.12A few months later,
the
DOJ announced that it had made a list of about eight thousand men between the ages of eighteen and
thirty-three from specific (but unnamed) countries who had entered the United States after January
2000 who were to be “interviewed” by law enforcement personnel. Of this list, fewer than twenty were
arrested on immigration charges and three on criminal charges, but none were shown to have any links
to terrorism.13Even as George W. Bush repeatedly assured the world that the United States was not at
war with Islam or with Muslims, regular Muslims were being rounded up and terrorized (in both senses
of the term) through the logic of guilt by association. Another program initiated in 2002, the National Security Entry-Exit
Registration System (NSEERS), which had its origins in the 1996 AEDPA terrorism bill and was amended by the USA PATRIOT Act, required male
immigrants sixteen and older from twenty-five countries to report to INS offices in order to be “fingerprinted, photographed, interviewed, and
have their financial information copied, or to register when they enter the country, then re-register after thirty days,” as legal scholar Nancy
Murray writes.14(The countries were named this time, and included Muslim majority and Middle Eastern countries as well as North Korea.) By
fall 2003, more than eighty-three thousand immigrant residents had registered under the program. As their reward for coming forward, 13,799
found themselves facing deportation proceedings. As for whether “terrorists” were apprehended by this program, eleven people were found to
have “links” to terrorism. The program yielded not a single terrorism conviction.15It was eventually suspended in 2011, but its effects linger. In
2003, another thousand people were arrested as part of a program to catch “absconders” from Middle Eastern nations who had overstayed
their visas and who might have knowledge of “terrorist activity.”16Many of these people were put “on planes to destinations where they knew
no one. They left behind jobs, homes, and families, including American born children.”17Such
actions are nothing if not the
wholesale demonization of Muslims, who are now “guilty until proven innocent.” Their consequences
reach far beyond the Arab and South Asian Muslim communities. Non-Muslim peace activists and antiwar organizers
soon became targets of surveillance and interrogation as well. Such policing of dissenting views is not new; in the 1960s, the FBI
launched its counterintelligence program, known as COINTELPRO, to track, infiltrate, threaten, discredit,
and harass members of the New Left, in particular the Black Power movement. As lawyer Steve Downs writes,
“The FBI planted false reports in the media, smeared reputations through forged letters and rumors, used agents provocateurs to disrupt
organizations and create false arrests, engaged in violence, and in many other ways attacked the ability of targeted organizations to function
and achieve their political goals . . . to ‘protect national security, prevent violence, and maintain the existing social and political order.’ ”The
program was roundly criticized in the 1970s and was suspended; attorney general Edward H. Levi declared that “such activity was intolerable in
our society.”18Yet in the rush of post–9/11 fear, systematic violations of civil liberties have been deemed not only tolerable but necessary to
“keep the nation secure.”
As a result, the FBI can now gather information about “concentrated ethnic
communities,” on the grounds that such information can aid in the analysis of “potential threats and
vulnerabilities” and assist in “domain awareness.”19Put simply, the FBI is legally permitted to racially profile
the Muslim community, though it does not use that term. Federal law bans profiling on the basis of race or
ethnicity, but it does not explicitly ban profiling on the basis of religion or national origin. Assuming that a
devout Muslim from a Middle east country is linked to terrorism is perfectly legal.20 These culturally racist practices are
justified through pseudoscientific theories of “radicalization” that will be discussed later in the chapter. In a
nutshell, what we see here is one of the myths discussed in chapter 3 – “Islam is inherently violent” – being
operationalized by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in their day-to-day activities.
Illegal Surveillance
FBI breaking law and abusing intelligence for a fishing expedition
Harris in 2014 (Shane, Senior Staff Writer at Foreign Policy, “The FBI’s Dirty Little Secret, The NSA
wasn't the only one snooping on ordinary Americans.”, Foreign Policy,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/07/09/the-fbis-dirty-little-secret/)
If the racial and religious profiling allegations prove true, the FBI would not only have broken the law,
but it would be guilty of the worst intelligence abuses since the days of COINTELPRO, the covert and
occasionally illegal spying programs that targeted American political activists, Vietnam War protesters, civil rights leaders, and even some U.S.
government officials for their political associations and views. The
ensuing scandal gave birth to the system of privacy
laws that govern spying on Americans today. The former senior intelligence official said it would be
illegal to monitor any of the five men simply because of their jobs or political affiliations. "Someone
might be the head of a Muslim organization. But that cannot be the basis for suspicion" used to obtain a
surveillance warrant, the former official said. "You have to make the case. You have to have probable
cause. It can’t be a fishing expedition."
Lacking restraint, the FBI is violating the first amendment – political and racial
profiling
Fisher 4 Linda E. Fisher Nov. 5, 2004 (Assistant Professor in Residence at University of Connecticut) “GUILT BY EXPRESSIVE ASSOCIATION:
POLITICAL PROFILING, SURVEILLANCE AND THE PRIVACY OF GROUPS” ARIZONA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 46:621
Muslims who frequent mosques and Islamic centers—particularly those that express religious or political views considered
“extreme”—are now concerned about being subjected to abusive and unjustified law enforcement
behaviors similar to those documented by the Senate Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities
(hereinafter Church Committee Report) in 1976.12 Without external constraints, law enforcement almost inevitably
investigates dissidents based on their political or religious expression. Moreover, legal controls on
surveillance have recently been lifted or modified, potentially facilitating renewed political
surveillance.13 Politically motivated surveillance such as that previously engaged in by the FBI raises
serious First Amendment concerns, including potential violations of associational rights. When
investigations focus not on legitimate law enforcement purposes but rather on subjects’ First Amendment conduct,14
fundamental yet fragile constitutional rights are abridged.15 One could accurately dub this phenomenon
“political profiling.”16 This form of profiling relies on guilt by association and is simply not an effective
law enforcement technique.17 Targets of political surveillance typically report being chilled in the
exercise of their rights to engage in free speech and the free exercise of religion. And, suffering actual or potential
damage to their reputations, they change their behavior accordingly.18 Many citizens and lawful residents are
reluctant to engage in First Amendment conduct if that activity will result in an FBI file branding them as
extremists or terrorists. And in the most extreme cases, information gathered can be used to destroy organizations
and lives.19 The FBI recently has admitted surveilling mosques in nine U.S. cities, and to keeping certain Muslims in
the U.S. under intensive surveillance.20 Agents have insisted that certain mosques provide them with lists of worshippers.21 In February of
2004, the Justice Department subpoenaed university records concerning peaceful on-campus meetings of local antiwar activists.22 In 2003, the
New York City Police Department questioned arrestees at antiwar demonstrations about their political affiliations and entered the information
into a database.23 Months later, the media reported that the FBI was collecting extensive information on the antiwar movement, in a search
for “extremist[s].”24 Moreover, the FBI
has continued to question political demonstrators across the country,
while the Justice Department has approved an FBI tactic of encouraging local police to report suspicious
behavior at political and antiwar demonstrations to counterterrorism units.25
A2: Reforms
The End Racial Profiling Act didn’t go far enough—loopholes in the law allows instances of
racial profiling to occur and be justified by law
Khera & Sanchez ‘14 [Farhana Khera and Hector E. Sanchez, Farhana Khera received her B.A. with honors in Political
Science and Economics from Wellesley College and her J.D. from Cornell Law School. She was Counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee,
Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Property Rights, 12/05/14, “No
Exception to Racial Profiling”] Accessed
Online: 6/09/15 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/farhana-khera/no-exceptions-for-racial_b_6275690.html
The killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and other unarmed African American men by police officers have sparked a much-needed national
conversation on the urgent need to address biased policing. As U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder prepares to step down, he is determined to
make civil rights enforcement and criminal justice reform cornerstones of his legacy as the nation's 82nd and first African American Attorney
General and has said that he will be releasing new guidance on racial profiling by law enforcement. But will he ensure that one of his final acts
as Attorney General is a truly meaningful advancement of civil rights? In
2001, President George W. Bush pledged to end racial
profiling by law enforcement. He said, "It's wrong, and we will end it in America." His administration would later enact guidance to
federal law enforcement agencies banning racial and ethnic profiling. This guidance, however, had
serious flaws: federal agents could continue to target Americans based on religion or country of origin
and could target any group of Americans so long as the scrutiny was related to border or national security. Since the issuance of the
guidance in 2003, abuse of these loopholes has run rampant and profoundly damaged the lives of
thousands of innocent Americans at the border, at the airport, and in day-to-day law enforcement
activities in cities and towns throughout the United States. In 2009, Attorney General Holder ordered an internal review
and stated his commitment to ending racial profiling, saying a year later that "racial profiling is wrong. It can leave a lasting scar on communities
and individuals. And it is, quite simply, bad policing--whatever city, whatever state." The Attorney General has also said that he and President
Obama have shared a common vision for creating a more perfect union. Now, five years
later, the Attorney General is
expected to announce revised guidance to expand the definition of racial profiling to protect not only racial and ethnic profiling,
but also profiling based on religion, national origin, gender, and sexual orientation. While this suggests progress, these reforms
must also close the national security and border integrity loopholes. These two loopholes are broad
enough to swallow the rule, permitting profiling in border communities and anywhere that a national
security justification can be invoked. For example, Border Patrol agents have boarded buses and trains travelling within 100 miles
of the Canadian border, in places like upstate New York, even if the trains and buses did not cross or even approach the borders, asking people
for proof of their status and sometimes even searching and detaining them. Similarly, the national security exception allows for continued
mapping and massive data collection of innocent communities throughout the country - including information about where they live, work and
make charitable donations - not based on evidence of wrongdoing but simply based on race, ethnicity or religion.
FBI operations target American Muslim communities by faking terrorism plots and arresting those
who fall for them, destroying trust and creating fear
Shah in 2014 (Naureen, Legislative counsel at the ACLU’s Washington legislative office, ”The FBI’s
counterterrorism sting operations are counterproductive”, Aljazeera America,
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/7/fbi-sting-operationscounterterrorismadeldaoud.html)
Adel Daoud is no Ferris Bueller. Yet the FBI began targeting Daoud as a terrorist mastermind shortly
after his 18th birthday. At the time the FBI began its sting operation, Daoud wasn’t part of a terrorist
cell, nor was any group recruiting him. He was, though, on the Internet, looking for answers about Islam and jihad.
At home and at his local mosque, the Muslim teen was told that jihad was nonviolent: It meant supporting your
family by being a good son. FBI undercover employees, finding Daoud online, did not affirm that
message. Instead, they worked with Daoud, ultimately driving him to downtown Chicago to detonate a
weapon of mass destruction outside a bar. As a report released today by Human Rights Watch and Columbia Law School’s
Human Rights Institute documents, the FBI’s tactics in some terrorism sting cases are not only abusive but
counterproductive. They instill fear of law enforcement instead of mutual trust. And they potentially
divert FBI resources from actual terrorism threats. Sting operations are nothing new, but the FBI is using
significantly more aggressive tactics in American Muslim communities than it has in others. It is
deploying informants and undercover FBI agents to mosques and community centers around the
country in what sometimes appear to be virtual fishing expeditions. In some cases, the FBI has instructed informants
to strike up conversations about jihad with anyone who will listen. These investigations appear to pick off the lowesthanging fruit, including the mentally ill and the poor, who are vulnerable to manipulation. In one case, the
subject of “The Newburgh Sting,” an HBO documentary premiering this week, an informant promised a 45-year-old African-American man
$250,000 to participate in a fake attack. After losing his job at Walmart, the man accepted the offer. For every terrorism bust the FBI claims
based on such tactics, there is a cost. Deploying
informants and conducting surveillance without reasonable
suspicion has sent chills through many American Muslim communities. Some parents with whom we spoke feared
the FBI might recruit their teenage kids to become informants on their communities. Others said they feared that strangers in their mosques
and community centers could be undercover FBI agents or infiltrators, hunting for youth to entrap in fake terrorist plots. The government has
racked up hundreds of convictions based on terrorism stings. Multiple studies have found that nearly half of federal terrorism convictions since
the 9/11 attacks resulted from informant-based cases. Some may be lawful and justifiable, yet almost
30 percent of these
convictions were sting operations in which the informant played an active role in the underlying plot. In
too many cases, the government, often acting through informants, developed the fake terrorism plot,
persuaded and sometimes pressured the targeted individuals to participate and provided the resources
to carry it out. The FBI’s wisdom in pursuing these cases, rather than investigating threats and individuals who were actually operational,
is questionable at best. Similarly questionable is the government’s expansive surveillance and collection of
information about all Americans, including American Muslims, which we continue to learn about through revelations
from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Rather than helping FBI analysts connect the dots, the flood of data is impairing
the FBI’s ability to properly assess and respond to threat information it receives. While we can’t expect the FBI to prevent every terrorist attack,
recent ones like the Boston Marathon bombing show the need for a sober re-evaluation of the agency’s methods.
Squo = Islamophobic
Surveillance = Racist
The American people use Racism to justify surveillance Muslims while claiming white
terrorist “are a true American Hero and we need more of you to make a stand."
Smith 2012 (David Smith ,11 UCLA J. Islamic & Near E. L. 85 2012)
Racism help explain the FBI's surveillance of Muslim and Muslim-appearing individuals and groups. In
particular, race helps us understand the dynamics between the Muslim community and the FBI. Michael Omi
and Howard Winant argue that race "symbolize[s] social conflict and interests by reference to different types of human bodies."
207 Race is a social construct that bears meaning when attached to a person's body. To be black is more
than simply a phenotype. Blackness, for example, connotes a person's unique experience within the
American social fabric.2 0 8 Because it is a social construct, race is a fluid concept that evolves over
time.209 Racialization refers to the social construction of race and the process of attaching a social
meaning to a specific identity or body.2 10 The meaning that attaches to a human body then produces
different social dynamics and social structures. 211 Racialization of Muslim and Muslim-appearing
individuals, then, involves equating identity characteristic-Middle Eastern appearance, beards, or
language-with suspicious conduct. 2 12 This logic tracks the racialization of many groups: (1) blacks and
Latinos are equated to criminality; (2) Latino's are equated to illegal immigration; and (3) Asian appearance
is associated with disloyalty. 213 Terrorism, foreignness and disloyalty are meanings that attach to Muslim
appearance. 214 According to this social meaning, a Muslim or Muslimappearing person is more prone to
involvement in terrorist activities than other groups and expresses a greater allegiance to religion than
to his or her nation.2 15 The government's use of confidential informants in mosques to manufacture
terrorism related crimes and previously mentioned federal government programs such as Fusion
Centers and TIPS, show this process at work.2 16 That white individuals often escape the terrorist trope further supports the
notion that private individuals and government actors racialize Muslim and Muslim-appearing persons as terrorists, or as national security
threats. As Leti Volpp writes, "U.S. Authorities did not go around detaining white men because Timothy McVeigh, a white man, had blown up . .
. Oklahoma City buildings . . . ."217 She further adds that a
white person like Timothy McVeigh is seen more as an
individual whereas Muslim and Muslim- appearing individuals are inextricably associated with group identity, and
are consequently seen as prone to violence. 2 18 Recent stories further support Volpp's point. By and large, the publicor at
least the media-does not consider Joe Stack a terrorist. The "Houston Tax Protestor," Joe Stack, was a middle-aged white man driven by antigovernment ideology to fly a plane into an IRS building, killing at least one innocent person. 2 19 In his suicide note, Joe
Stack stated
that violence is the only way to end the IRS' oppressive taxation. 220 Further, even a right-wing Militia
group, the Hutarree, escaped the terrorism label when it plotted to kill police officers and bomb their
funerals. 2 2 1 In contrast to so-called domestic Muslim individuals involved in criminal activity, many
individuals, including the media, disputed the claim that Joe Stack was a terrorist. For example, rather than
calling him a terrorist, one individual started a Facebook page devoted to Joe Stack, declaring, "Joe
Stack, you are a true American Hero and we need more of you to make a stand." 222 Yet in his suicide
note, Joe Stack demonstrated that his aggression was ideologically driven by stating that, "violence not
only is the answer, it is the only answer" to end the IRS' oppressive taxation. 2 23 Most individuals would
agree that terror includes the use of violence, or the threat of violence, for the purpose of creating
political or ideological change. 2 24 Ideology, specifically anti-IRS ideology, motivated Stack to commit terrorist acts.
However, the media and the government did not assign Stack the terrorist label. It appears we sometimes reserve the
terrorist label for foreign attackers. 225 Perhaps, what ultimately embodies terrorism is foreignness? If this is true, this distinction helps
explains why some individuals and groups escape the terrorist label while Muslim and Muslim-appearing persons cannot. As discussed more
thoroughly below, Muslim identity and Muslim appearance are framed as inherently foreign to American identity and therefore, politically- or
ideologically-motivated violence committed by a Muslim or Muslim-appearing person is constitutive of terrorism.
Viewing the Muslim-American community as the “other” has resulted in false criminal
accusation, imprisonment, and warrantless surveillance—complete erosion of constitutional
rights
Hardwood ‘13 [Matthew Hardwood, 7/09/13, “The Surveillance State Attacks the First Amendment”]
Accessed Online: 7/08/15 http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-surveillance-stateattacks-the-first-amendment/
The idea that American law enforcement’s mass surveillance of Muslim communities is a necessary, if
unfortunate, counterterrorism tool rests with the empirically false notion that American Muslims are more
prone to political violence than other Americans. This is simply not true. According to the National Consortium for the Study
of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), right-wing terrorists perpetrated 145 “ideologically motivated homicide incidents”
between 1990 and 2010. In that same period, notes START, “al Qaeda affiliates, al Qaeda-inspired extremists, and
secular Arab Nationalists committed 27 homicide incidents in the United States involving 16 perpetrators or
groups of perpetrators.” Last November, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center published a report on America’s violent far-right
extremists. Its numbers were even more startling than START’s. “The consolidated dataset,” writes report author Arie Perliger, “includes
information on 4,420 violent incidents that occurred between 1990 and 2012 within U.S. borders, and which
caused 670 fatalities and injured 3,053 people.” Perliger also found that the number of far-right attacks had
jumped 400% in the first 11 years of the 21st century. It’s highly probable that the FBI drastically undercounts
instances of terrorism perpetrated by right-wing extremists because of cultural double standards. As the
New America Foundation’s Peter Bergen has noted, attacks associated with anti-abortion or white supremacist ideologies are
rarely, if ever, counted as terrorist attacks. A typical example: the massacre of worshippers at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek,
Wisconsin, in August 2012 by a white supremacist. Simply put, there is an unhealthy obsession among American law
enforcement agencies (and American society at large) with stopping violence perpetrated by American
Muslims, one that is wholly out of line with the numbers. There is no doubt that the events of 9/11 play into this — never
mind that not one hijacker was American — but there is something much darker at work here as well. It’s the fear of a people, a
culture, and a religion that most Americans do not understand and therefore see as alien and
dangerous. The fear of the “other” has wiggled its way into the core of another American generation.
“While Vile, All of This Speech Is Protected by the First Amendment” Widespread surveillance and suspicion aren’t the only
things American Muslims have to worry about, feel frustrated by, or fear. They can also point to the way
fellow American Muslims are treated in the larger criminal justice system. Since 9/11, the FBI has used
tactics that clearly raise the issue of entrapment in arresting hundreds of Muslims inside the U.S. on
terrorism-related charges. Investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War
on Terrorism, did the hard work of compiling and analyzing all of these cases between September 11, 2001, and August 2011. What he found
was alarming. “Of the
508 defendants, 243 had been targeted through an FBI informant, 158 had been
caught in an FBI terrorism sting, and 49 had encountered an agent provocateur. Most of the people who
didn’t face off against an informant weren’t directly involved with terrorism at all, but were instead
Category II offenders, small-time criminals with distant links to terrorists overseas. Seventy-two of these
Category II offenders had been charged with making false statements, while 121 had been prosecuted
for immigration violations. Of the 508 cases, I could count on one hand the number of actual terrorists…
who posed a direct and immediate threat to the United States.” Those numbers, however damning, still don’t fully
reflect the inequity American Muslims face within the U.S. criminal justice system when it comes to terrorism allegations.
Islamophobia Advantage
A2: Terrorism DA
Profiling Fails
The Muslim-American community is a powerful ally is fighting terrorism, suspicion-less
surveillance programs are not only useless in protecting national security, but shatters
Muslim-Americans trust in officials
Hardwood ‘13 [Matthew Hardwood, 7/09/13, “The Surveillance State Attacks the First Amendment”]
Accessed Online: 7/08/15 http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-surveillance-stateattacks-the-first-amendment/
In the aftermath of 9/11, law enforcement
has infiltrated Muslim American communities and spied on them in
ways that would have outraged Americans, had such tactics been used against Christian communities
after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, or after any of the other hate crimes or anti-abortion-based acts of
violence committed since then by right-wing extremists. Documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests
by the American Civil Liberties Union make clear that FBI agents in California used community outreach programs to
gather intelligence at mosques and other local events, recording the opinions and associations of people
not suspected of any crime. In 2008, the FBI loosened its internal guidelines further, allowing agents to collect
demographic information on ethnically concentrated communities and map them for intelligence and
investigative purposes. There is no question that the most extreme example of such blanket, suspicion-less surveillance has been conducted by
the New York City Police Department (NYPD). As revealed by the Associated Press, the
NYPD’s Intelligence Division carried out a
secret surveillance program on the city’s varied Muslim communities based on the erroneous belief that their
religion makes them more susceptible to violent radicalization. The program, which continues today, looks something
like this, according to Mapping Muslims: “rakers,” or undercover officers, are sent into neighborhoods to identify “hot spots” — mosques,
schools, restaurants, cafes, halal meat shops, hookah bars — and told to chat up people to “gauge sentiment,” while setting up “listening
They are ordered to record
what imams and congregants say and take note of who attended services and meetings. These crawlers
are encouraged to initiate “create and capture” conversations with their targets, bringing up terrorism
or some other controversial topic, recording the response, and then sharing it with the NYPD. The
posts.” “Crawlers,” or informants, are then recruited and sent to infiltrate mosques and religious events.
intelligence unit also went mobile, checking out and infiltrating American-Muslim student groups from Connecticut to New Jersey and even as
far away as Pennsylvania. When
news of the NYPD’s spying program broke, it shattered trust within the city’s
Muslim communities, giving rise to general suspicion and fraying community ties of all sorts. This
naturally raises the question: How many terrorism plots were identified and disrupted thanks to this
widespread and suspicionless surveillance program? The answer: none. Worse, the chief of the NYPD
Intelligence Division admitted in sworn testimony last summer that the Muslim surveillance program did not even
generate a single criminal lead. The incredibly invasive, rights-eroding program was a complete bust, a total
waste of the resources of the New York City Police Department. And that’s without even considering what is surely its
most harmful aspect: the likelihood that, at least in the short term, it has caused irreparable damage to the Muslim
community’s trust in the police. Surveillance, concludes the Mapping Muslims report, “has stifled constitutionally protected activity
and destroyed trust between American Muslim communities and the agencies charged with protecting them.” When people fear the
police, tips dry up, potentially making the community less safe. This is important, especially given that
the Muslim-American community has helped prevent, depending on whose figures you use, from 21%–
40% of all terrorism plots associated with Muslims since 9/11. That’s grounds for cooperation, not
alienation: a lesson that would have been learned by a police department with strong ties to and trust in
the community.
Current government actions towards Muslim risks them not trusting the government
which would lead them not going to the government if they suspect a terrorist
Harris 2009 (David A. Harris, University of Pittsburgh - School of Law,1-1-2009, "Law Enforcement and
Intelligence Gathering in Muslim and Immigrant Communities After 9/11 ")
If building these relationships between law enforcement and communities would usually take considerable effort, it has been more difficult yet
to build them between law enforcement and Muslim communities. First, in many jurisdictions prior
to September 11, 2001, there
existed no relationships at all between Muslim communities and the FBI and police departments. Michael
Rolince, a thirty-one-year veteran of the FBI who now works as a counterterrorism consultant in the private sector, says that “[a]fter 9/11, I was
of the opinion that we didn’t have the kind of inroads [into the Muslim community] that we needed to have,” Rolince says. “We didn’t know
what was in our own backyard” as far as the Muslim population, so Rolince and his colleagues had to begin their efforts from scratch.38 And, as
if starting from the very beginning would not be hard enough, any
effort to create positive relationships between law
enforcement and American Muslims would begin not on a blank slate, but against less-than-positive
experiences. Efforts to build relationships came against the background of arrests of many hundreds of
Muslims by the FBI after 9/11 on immigration and petty criminal charges, because the authorities
suspected the arrestees – without evidence – of connection to the attacks or potential terrorist activity. The
government detained these individuals, often for weeks or months and in severe conditions, and denied them access
to lawyers and family members.39 The government then kept them confined under a “hold until cleared”
policy, effectively turning the presumption of innocence on its head, and then deported almost all of
them; none had any connection to terrorism.40 The FBI followed this with a program of “voluntarily”
interviews with thousands of young men from Muslim countries to ask whether they had any
involvement in terrorism or had any information that might assist the authorities.41 As unlikely as it seems that such an effort would
uncover valuable information,42 a report by Justice Department officials to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft said that the program helped
disrupt potential terrorist activities and also led to meaningful investigative leads.43 But these officials offered no proof of these assertions;
two years later, neither the Department of Justice nor the FBI had bothered to analyze the data from the interviews, and had no plans to do
so.44 From
their perspective, people within the Muslim community saw the effort as “‘one of the most
damaging [policies] we’ve ever seen’” because it spread fear and confusion in Muslim communities
which might have the perverse result of making Muslims hesitate to come forward with important
information when they did have it. These post-9/11 actions and others by the government thus made it
much more difficult for law enforcement to create strong relationships with Muslim communities,
because they have stimulated not trust in, but fear of, federal law enforcement. A nationwide study by the Vera
Institute of Justice in 2006 showed just how deep the gulf between Muslim communities and federal law enforcement has become. The study,
funded by the National Institute of Justice and performed over a two-year period, revealed that Arab Americans feared the intrusion of federal
policies and practices even more than hate crimes or acts of violence.46 These findings show just how difficult it will be for law enforcement to
secure positive relations with Muslims.47 To make matters worse, recall that many Muslims emigrated to the U.S. from countries that
functioned as police states, such as Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Iran. Individuals from such countries would almost certainly begin any relationship
with the police or government officials with a presumption of suspicion. In their native countries, a knock on the door of one’s home or
business from police or their equivalent officials struck terror into the heart, and every whispered conversation discussing the state or its
leadership held the potential for victimization by an informant. This made distrust of police endemic in these communities, and the habits and
reflexes of mind learned in such an environment would undoubtedly come with immigrants from those places.48
The FBI spied on people because they were Muslim and that surveillance undermined
the FBI's legitimacy within the Muslim community.
Smith 2012 (David Smith ,11 UCLA J. Islamic & Near E. L. 85 2012)
Former FBI informant Craig Monteilh ("Monteilh") declared in a 2009 interview that "Islam itself is a national security threat."'
Monteilh's statement captures the attitude government officials have towards the Muslim community.
Indeed, this statement helps explains why Post-9/11 government surveillance targets Muslim and Muslimappearing individuals and groups. 2 Consequently, this Article explores problems associated with the view that Islam is a national security threat
and how the First Amendment right to associate might address those problems. Monteilh publically disclosed that the FBI hired him
to surveil mosques in Southern California.3 From July 2006 to October 2007, Monteilh surveilled mosques and collected information on
Muslim individuals throughout Southern California.4 Monteilh's arrangement with the FBI, however, ended on bad terms. Monteilh believed that the FBI breached
its agreement with him. He filed a civil complaint in 2009 alleging that the FBI failed to keep several agreements, including a failure to remove a restraining order
placed against him by the Islamic Center of Irvine ("ICOI"), a mosque he surveilled.5 He also alleged that the FBI failed to keep its promise to put Monteilh in a
witness protection program, and that the FBI failed to pay him the $100,000 it promised him at the end of the surveillance operation in Southern California.6
Monteilh was introduced to the FBI by Orange County police officers whom he met at a gym. Monteith had recently been released from state prison for check fraud.
While in prison, Monteilh had associated with a white supremacist gang. The FBI and Monteilh agreed that Monteilh would be a narcotics informant for the FBI,
dealing mainly with drug deals made by white supremacist gangs. Over the next several years, Monteilh helped the FBI bring charges against several white
supremacists and Russian mafia leaders.7 In
2006, an FBI agent asked Monteilh to infiltrate mosques and the Muslim
community in the name of national security.8 Monteilh agreed. The FBI then flew him to Virginia for counterterrorism training.9 Upon his
return, Monteilh attended several mosques throughout Southern California. He infiltrated mosques in Irvine, Tustin, Anaheim,
Culver City, West Covina and San Pedro.' 0 His primary target, however, was the ICOI." The FBI gave Monteilh several
instructions. He was to start his infiltration as a new convert. At first he was to wear "western" clothes so that his gradual conversion appeared natural.12
When Monteilh first met with the ICOI Imam, Monteilh explained that he was French-Syrian and that he wanted to return to his roots by converting to Islam.13 A
week after meeting the ICOI Imam, Monteilh made a public declaration of conversion before hundreds of congregants of his Muslim faith, known as shahadah.
Thereafter Monteilh attended the ICOI on a daily basis, sometimes attending services several times a day. 14 Soon after his shahadah, Monteilh assumed his
informant name, Farouk al-Aziz.' 5 He shed his "western" clothes and began wearing a head cap, robe and shawl.16 He also grew a beard and began attending
language and cultural classes taught at the Berlitz Language School.17 The
FBI instructed Monteilh to gather information so that
the FBI could "build files on as many individuals as possible."18 Agents told him to obtain the names of
mosque leaders, such as board members, Imams and individuals who taught classes at mosques.19 In addition, agents told
Monteilh to target individuals who fit a certain profile. Specifically, Monteilh was to look for individuals
who studied fiqh, a system of Islamic jurisprudence that addresses such topics as morals and etiquette.
20 Agents also told Monteilh to identify individuals who went on Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, or any individuals
who attended Islamic schools overseas. 21 Individuals expressing critical views of U.S. foreign policy
were also targets. 22 Monteilh also collected information about the Muslim Student Union at University of California, Irvine. 23 Under these
instructions, Monteilh made an effort to converse with mosque congregants regarding their views on
Islam. Over time, Monteilh became more aggressive in his conversations about Islam. 24 He would occasionally bring upjihad. He would often invite mosque
congregants and other Muslims to the gym 25 where he would gather information for the FBI.26 At one point, he said to several Muslims working out at the gym,
"[i]t's good that you guys are getting ready for the jihad."27 Monteilh
used a recording device hidden in a key to record his
conversations with Muslim individuals. 28 He often left the recording device with his belongings in the prayer hall where students met.2 9
Monteilh did not just gather information about Muslim individuals so that the FBI could prosecute
individuals. He also gathered information to enable the FBI to pressure individuals to become
informants.30 One of Monteilh's targets was Ahmadullah Niazi ("Niazi"), Monteilh's Arabic teacher. Monteilh and Niazi spoke often about religion and jihad.
During one of their meetings, Niazi portrayed Osama bin Laden as an "angel." 31 The FBI brought no terrorism charges against Niazi but eventually prosecuted him
for providing false information on his naturalization application and making misrepresentations to obtain a passport. 32 But before charging Niazi, agents pressured
Niazi to become an informant. Agents told Niazi that if he did not become an informant, agents would make his life a "living hell."3 3 Niazi was not likely the only
Muslim individual receiving threats from the FBI to become an informant. 3 4 The FBI paid Monteilh a significant amount of money for the information he obtained.
Monteilh claims that the FBI paid him anywhere between $2,500 and $11,250 for the information he provided.35 As described in this Article, paid
informants are a standard element in the FBI's War on Terror.36 Agents rebuffed Monteilh when Monteilh
asked agents whether his work amounted to racial profiling. An agent told him, "[w]hite little old ladies
aren't blowing up buildings and planes."3 7 "We're looking at these people based on the fact that there's
a terrorist threat in the Islamic community. "3 Monteilh's surveillance adversely affected the Muslim
community in three ways. First, Monteilh's surveillance alienated members of the Muslim community. As
mentioned earlier, Monteilh would often say strange things to Muslim individuals at mosques or in other contexts. He sometimes broached the topic of jihad with
mosque members; he asked one individual whether it meant physical violence.39 That individual told Monteilh to seek 30 Glover, supra note 25; Teresa Watanabe
& Paloma Esquivel, L.A. Area Muslims Say FBI guidance from the Imam40 and began avoiding Monteilh 41 to the point that he eventually stopped attending the
mosque because Monteilh was usually there.42 Monteilh's
violent rhetoric led mosque members to report him to the
Council on American-Islamic Relations ("CAIR"). Ironically, CAIR reported Monteilh to the FBI.4 3 Second,
Monteilh had a negative impact on the mosque after he was discovered as the government's
undercover informant. Many community members stopped attending mosques because they feared that
the FBI was surveiling them.44 Indeed, Muslim leaders reported reduced charitable donations. 45 One
mosque Imam reported that his mosque experienced a thirty to fifty percent drop in charitable
donations.46 This drop, he stated, was in part due to the economy and in part a consequence of FBI surveillance. 7 But such a steep
reduction more likely results from a fear of government prosecution and persecution than an economic downturn.48 This fear makes sense when
an FBI agent, on one occasion, questioned every single congregant about his or her charitable donations at
another Southern California mosque. 49 Such questioning heightens the general fear that the FBI might
target you. If you are Muslim, the price for participating in your religion depends on how much you want to subject yourself to government scrutiny.50
Third, Monteilh's role as an informant created tension between the government and the Muslim
community.5 ' His surveillance undermined the FBI's legitimacy within the Muslim community. 52 Muslim
individuals are less likely to cooperate with the FBI when they do not view the FBI's conduct as
legitimate.53 Indeed, after it was revealed that Monteilh infiltrated Southern California mosques, the Shura
Council of Southern California cut off its ties with the FBI.5 The Shura Council of Southern California is an umbrella organization for
mosques and Muslim organizations throughout Los Angeles, San Diego, San Bernardino, Riverside and Orange counties. The council coordinates activities and
advocates on behalf of its member organizations. By
cutting off its ties, the Shura Council spoke loudly that the Muslim
community did not view the FBI's activities in Southern California as legitimate. With these consequences of Monteith's
surveillance in mind, this Article makes two claims. First, this Article claims that the statement that "Islam is a national security
threat" precisely captures the FBI's current counterterrorism policy and strategy. Monteilh was not the
only informant surveilling mosques.55 Beyond Orange County, many confidential informants have infiltrated and continue to infiltrate mosques
throughout the country. 56 Moreover, the FBI's use of confidential informants is merely an extension of the FBI's Post-9/11 view of the Muslim community: since
9/11 the federal government has targeted Islam and Muslims' specific religious conduct without any factual knowledge that individuals, groups, or mosques were
involved in terrorist or criminal activity.57 This Article further argues that
the FBI "racializes" the Muslim community as a security
threat, and as inherently untrustworthy and foreign. Put differently, government actors surveil the
Muslim community precisely because it views the Muslim community as a national security threat. The
government does not seek cooperation from a perceived enemy. Nor does it seek cooperation from a
perceived untrustworthy source. Second, the Article claims that the First Amendment right to associate protects
groups from being categorized as a national security threat solely based on membership in that group.
Indeed, the very foundation of the right to associate serves to prevent the government from burdening groups based on stereotypes and assumptions. The right to
associate prevents the government from presuming a group's guilt based on unspoken stereotypes about that group.58 In particular, the
Supreme Court
noted in NAACP v. Button that it was important to take race into account when weighing the burdens on
a group's right to associate. The court in Button stated, "[w]e cannot close our eyes to the fact that the . .
.. civil rights movement has engendered the intense resentment and opposition of the politically
dominant white community." 59 In other words, racial attitudes are an important factor in considering whether or not the government has placed
an unconstitutional burden on the right to associate. For example, in Button and similar cases, the government acted as if NAACP members were inherently
subversive without any factual basis for arriving at this conclusion. NAACP v. Button is relevant today. Just as NAACP members were viewed as inherently subversive
in NAACP v. Button, the government today appears to treat Muslims as inherently violent or inherently prone to terrorism. This view leads the government to
surveil or interrogate Muslim individuals without a factual basis indicating wrongdoing. Simply being Muslim creates the presumption of terrorism; this presumption
can only be rebutted by Muslim individuals' and groups' acquiescence to surveillance. 60 Put dif- ferently, the FBI, and indeed the general public, expects the
Muslim community to subject itself to surveillance. Refusal to do so suggests that there is "something to hide." Take for example, a police officer who asks a person
if he can search the person's bag. The officer is suspicious that the person is carrying an illegal substance. According to common expectations in this situation, an
innocent person should consent to a search, and a guilty person should not.6 1 Legally, however, a person is still presumed innocent if he or she does not consent to
that search. 62 In other words, the police search implies a person's presumed guilt. Consenting to the search rebuts that presumed guilt regardless of if the person
is legally allowed to refuse. Similarly, in the surveillance context, the FBI expects the Muslim community to subject itself to surveillance to rebut the same presumed
guilt; this expectation exists whether or not it is legally necessary or appropriate.
Racial profiling is not an effective method- the majority of terrorist attacks have been
by white supremacists
Murray in 10 (Nancy, “Profiling in the age of total information awareness”, Race & Class Copyright ©
2010 Institute of Race Relations, Vol. 52(2): 3–24 10.1177/0306396810377002 http://rac.sagepub.com)
racial profiling has not proved an effective method of fighting crime, using a combination of religion and
ethnicity to identify terrorists has little to show for the massive resource allocation, although inflated Justice Department
figures may suggest otherwise.44 In fact, the overwhelming majority of terrorist plots that were disrupted in the 1995–
2005 period involved white supremacist, environmental, or anti abortion perpetrators and attracted little media attention.45
The cases involving Muslims that have been prosecuted with considerable government and media
fanfare have often involved the use of FBI informants who provided plans, money and weapons to
usually clueless plotters. Perhaps the most hapless were the ‘homegrown terrorists’ known as the Liberty
City 7, who were not Muslim although they were initially presented as such. Living in an impoverished Miami neighbourhood,
this group of poor Haitian immigrants and Haitian-Americans attended the Moorish Science Temple, which
was infiltrated by an informant known as ‘Brother Mohammed’. He promised their leader $50,000 in cash, firearms and other
equipment if the group would agree to blow up federal buildings and the Sears Tower in Chicago. Even
though the FBI dubbed the plot ‘aspirational rather than operational’, federal prosecutors pursued the
men relentlessly (‘they never quit’). In 2009, four years after they were arrested, and after two trials ended in
hung juries, the federal government convened a third trial and finally got a jury to agree to convict five
of the seven men
Just as
Cooperation K2 CT
Muslim communities cooperation with government is key to stopping terrorism
Harris 2009 (David A. Harris, University of Pittsburgh - School of Law,1-1-2009, "Law Enforcement and
Intelligence Gathering in Muslim and Immigrant Communities After 9/11 ")
For at least one reason, the
consensus on the importance of building trust-based relationships as a way to fight
terror cannot surprise anyone in law enforcement: we know this method works. Few people view the world as pragmatically
as law enforcement officers do. They want to use strategies and tactics that will protect the public as effectively as
possible. And building good relations with Muslim communities has paid off against terrorists in the most direct
way possible. The Lackawanna case, the Muslim community played the same kind of critical role. When the
FBI announced the indictments of the three individuals in Toledo, Ted Wasky, the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge of the Bureau’s
Cleveland field office, which conducted the investigation, explicitly acknowledged the help of Toledo’s
Muslims. Wasky praised the extensive and important cooperation of Muslims in the case, resulting in important information about the
suspects flowing to law enforcement. “[The members of the Toledo Muslim community] are the ones who deserve
the most credit,” Wasky said. “The ability to prevent another terrorist attack cannot be won without the
support that the community gave.”discussed above, remains a showcase example. The men apprehended in
Lackawanna, characterized by the U.S. Department of Justice as a sleeper cell waiting for the word to put their deadly agenda into action,
might have attacked except for the fact that the Muslim community in Lackwanna passed crucial
information to the FBI that prompted the investigation. But the Lackawanna case does not stand alone.
For example, in the Toledo terrorism case mentioned by FBI Director Robert Mueller in his speech in 2006, The widespread
agreement in law enforcement that the cooperation of the Muslim communities remains vital to the success
of anti-terrorism efforts owes much to the strong consensus in law enforcement, building for at least twenty
years, on the basic The principles, goals, and benefits of community policing. Law enforcement almost everywhere
acknowledges that police efforts alone cannot make cities and towns safe from crime and criminals; rather, public safety requires a partnership
between police and the community that encourages communication about people and events on the ground. Community policing
means far more than community relations, or shallow, one-off efforts by police agencies to exhibit
sensitivity or hear the concerns of the communities they serve. Rather, the idea requires a deep
commitment to the idea that success in public safety efforts of any kind can only occur when strong,
positive connections exist between police and those they serve – that is, through partnerships based on
trust. That type of partnership requires sustained effort by both the police and communities to build
trust through establishing relationships and networks with each other, to develop a track record of joint efforts
toward common goals, and to respect each other as real partners. lessons for our anti-terrorism efforts seem
clear. If we believe that potential terrorists lurk in our Muslim communities, we must have good communications
with them. This requires relationships built on trust – just like everything else in community policing does.
Muslim communities are key to stopping terrorism, but profiling is wrong it damages
the faith of the communities in the government which will lead them not wanting to
report things in the future
Harris 2009 (David A. Harris, University of Pittsburgh - School of Law,1-1-2009, "Law Enforcement and
Intelligence Gathering in Muslim and Immigrant Communities After 9/11 ")
Looking at the cases the government has brought against terrorist suspects since September of 2001, one cannot
help but notice
that Muslim communities have done exactly what Mueller wants: they have actively brought the FBI and
other police agencies crucial information in terrorism cases. For example, the FBI still claims its six cases in
Lackawanna, New York, as among its biggest anti-terrorism victories. The
cases involved a group of six young men of Yemeni
descent accused of engaging in terrorist activity by, among other things, attending Al Qaeda training camps.9 The
cases, announced with great fanfare by then Attorney General John Ashcroft,10 resulted in guilty pleas from, and long prison terms
for, all of the accused.11 Few people remember that the arrests occurred only because the Yemeni community in
Lackawanna itself brought the men to the FBI’s attention.12 Without that information, the Lackawanna cell
would have remained undiscovered, perhaps with potentially disastrous results. The Lackawanna case (and others like it) explains
the strong consensus among law enforcement and security experts, both nationally and internationally, that cooperation and
partnership between law enforcement and Muslim communities represent the key to success against
terrorists. But the creation and cultivation of partnerships between law enforcement and Muslim
communities does not represent the only effort by the FBI and local police to gather intelligence to
prevent terrorism. Over the past several years, the FBI and the New York Police Department have made increasing
use of informants – untrained, often compromised civilians, who receive money or other significant benefits14 – placing them as
spies in Muslim religious and cultural institutions.15 In at least some cases – for example, in New York City16 and in Lodi,
California17 – investigations based on the use of informants have resulted in convictions, though some doubt
remains about the scope of these victories and the need for these kinds of efforts inside the U.S.18 And the trend toward using informants in
this way has begun to accelerate. The most recent sign came in the last months of the Bush Administration, when Attorney
General
Michael Mukasey announced significant changes in the rules governing FBI investigations.19 Since the 1970s,
when evidence of decades of abuses by the Bureau came to light,20 successive called an informant, but
he or she presents entirely different questions than those discussed here. When law enforcement places
its informants into situations or institutions, it deliberately targets these institutions or the individuals within
them for investigation, raising issues regarding law enforcement’s use of power and discretion, the
supervision of these efforts by the judicial branch, the compliance with rules for the use of this discretion, and especially whether
the facts should meet some threshold test before police exercise this discretion. When individuals come forward from within
these institutions to inform law enforcement, they act not as law enforcement’s agents, but rather as
concerned citizens who wish, in good faith, to report something suspicious. U.S. Attorneys General have
created official rules, known as the Attorney General’s Guidelines, to prohibit FBI misconduct.21 By the time that
Attorney General Mukasey took office, an array of Guidelines existed, all calibrated in individual ways to cover different types of
investigations. Mukasey announced a repeal of five sets of specialized Guidelines – those covering general criminal matters,
racketeering and terrorism enterprises, national security, foreign intelligence, and civil disorders and
demonstrations –and replaced them with one: the Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI
Operations.22 The Administration argued that these changes just made common sense; agents in all of these types of investigations would
now apply the same standards. Opponents objected to the new Guidelines, arguing that they would lead to racial
profiling in terrorism investigations.23 And to be sure, the placement of FBI spies into sensitive settings like mosques does
pose a threat to civil liberties of Muslims and Arab Americans.24 But the new Guidelines also create another, more significant danger:
they give the FBI complete discretion to place informants into the most sensitive settings in Muslim and Arab American communities25 –
mosques, social
service agencies, bookstores, and other organizations – without any evidence that these institutions and the
individuals who use them pose any genuine danger.26 While this standard (or non-standard) might at first be seen as a benefit to
the FBI because it allows the Bureau to use informants more easily, it actually poses a significant danger that has gone
largely unnoticed. Using informants in these Muslim religious and cultural contexts too frequently or casually
damages the Bureau’s critical and generally successful efforts to build partnerships with Muslim and
Arab American communities. It will cause lasting damage to the efforts to bring Muslim communities
and law enforcement together to build common cause against extremism, and will harm efforts to obtain
intelligence from these communities through carefully-built cooperative relationships established in the last five years. The reaction of
Muslim communities to news of the involvement of informers in terrorism cases has, in fact, seemed
especially sharp precisely because this comes against the background of police and community efforts to
engage in purposeful cooperation. When Muslims learn that the government has done this, members of
these communities feel used and betrayed – not partners of law enforcement, but suspects, each and every
one. We can ill afford to damage the possibility that these partnerships can serve as sources of
information; they remain our best – perhaps our only -- hope for obtaining the intelligence we need to head
off the damage of actual terrorist attacks in the future. Constructing these law enforcement/community partnerships, all
acknowledge, requires great efforts to build trust; when the use of informants has come to light
Terror Talk
Serial Policy Failure
Current studies of ‘terrorism’ ignore history and local context. Researchers don’t meet
terrorists, don’t go to places of conflict and don’t consider the implication of the word
‘terrorists’. The study has a state bias and can reinforce the status quo preventing any
real political reform.
Gunning 7
Jeroen Gunning. Gunning is deputy director of the Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and
Contemporary Political Violence at the University of Wales. “A Case for Critical Terrorism Studies?”,
Government and Opposition, Volume 42, Issue 3, pages 366–368, Summer 2007,
Another critique is that research tends to focus on a ‘short-term, immediate assessment’ of ‘current or
imminent threats’ as defined by state elites, without placing them in their wider social and historical
context or questioning to what extent the state or the status quo have contributed to these ‘imminent
threats’.14 Local context and history are largely ignored and ‘terrorism’ is too often treated, in Ranstorp’s
words, ‘generically and with a “one-size-fits-all formula”’.15 Very few articles focus on historical cases of
‘terrorism’.16 Fieldwork, moreover, is rare. Or, quoting O’Leary and Silke, ‘much of what is written about terrorism . .
. is written by people who have never met a terrorist, or have never actually spent significant time on
the ground in the areas most affected by conflict’ (which is in part a reflection of the crisis in area and language studies).17
Conceptual discussions are similarly observed to be largely defi- cient. In the words of social movement theorist
Sidney Tarrow ‘terrorism studies’ has been ‘largely innocent of theoretical apparatus’.18 Silke observed in 2004
that less than 2 per cent of articles published during the 1990s in the two core ‘terrorism’ journals dealt
with conceptual issues, and most of these concerned the definition of ‘terrorism’.19 Compared to other fields,
Silke considers ‘terrorism studies’ to be ‘extremely applied’, and insufficiently questioning of the
theoretical or ideological assumptions informing its research (although – as Horgan observes – since conceptual
discussions are more likely to occur in books than in articles, Silke’s sample may not be wholly representative).20 Most articles do not
explicitly draw on (cognate) theories to illuminate their data, although recent output has begun to be more theoretically
developed.21 Few articles consider the political agenda behind the use of the word ‘terrorism’ or whether
eradication through coercive means without political transformation is the most effective way forward
(although here too, recent output has been more critical).22 A related critique is that ‘terrorism studies’ tends to accept
uncritically the framing of the ‘terrorism problem’ by the state. Herman and O’Sullivan observed this in their tirade
against the ‘terrorism industry’, as did George, equally stridently, in his article ‘The Discipline of Terrorology’.23 But even ‘engaged’ critics such
as Silke, O’Leary, Crelinsten and Schmid and Jongman argue that ‘terrorism
studies’ often suffers from state bias. Schmid and
Jongman observed in exasperation that much of the field’s output resembled ‘counterinsurgency masquerading as
political science’.24 Crelinsten, Silke and O’Leary were more forgiving, simply observing that, as a result of governmentfunding opportunities and affinities between state institutions and researchers, research often displayed
an uncritical orientation towards state perspectives and concerns.25 The effect of this orientation can be
seen in both methodology and in the types of questions that remain unasked. One of the reasons so few
articles draw on personal interviews or attempt to understand those using terroristic methods
subjectively, through empathy and placing oneself in their shoes,26 is arguably this predisposition towards the status
quo. This same orientation makes it difficult to ask questions about the extent to which counterterrorism policies perpetuate the ‘terrorist threat’ or whether political transformation may be more
effective than mere coercive force aimed at eradication. Researchers may be too embedded socially and
culturally in an entity under ‘attack’ from ‘others’ to engage these ‘others’ subjectively or contemplate
radically different counter-terrorism tactics. Existing research foci and practices may also prevent
researchers from doing so by acting as disciplining agents.
Security Link
The political myth and media representation of Islam ingrains ideas of Islamaphobia
into our subconscious. The post-cold war vacuum, created by the lack of common
enemies to group against, is the media’s continual insistence on the ‘Security
Ideology’.
Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE AND EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE, FLORENCE, ITALY (‘Rethinking
Political Myth: The Clash of Civilizations as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy’, 2006, European Journal of Social Theory 9(3): 315–336))
For example, immediately
after the attacks, the New York Times launched a new section entitled ‘A Nation
Challenged’ which appeared every day for the next four months. The titles of the articles appearing in this section mostly
referred to a clash between Islam and the West: ‘Yes, this is about Islam’, ‘Jihad 101’, ‘Barbarians at the
gates’, ‘The force of Islam’, ‘The core of Muslim rage’, ‘Dreams of Holy War’, ‘The deep intellectual roots
of Islamic rage’, ‘The age of Muslim wars’, ‘This is a religious war’ (Abrahamian, 2003). This latter article was
illustrated with pictures of atrocities from medieval Europe, including Goya’s Spanish Inquisition (Sullivan, 2001).
Similarly, an article in the Washington Post written by an expert on religion, warned that the government should take care to respect Islam
because its ‘awakening’ had pitted a huge section of the world against the West. The article was entitled ‘A Fervor America Should Easily
Recognise’ and was accompanied by a photo of hooded men carrying the Koran and a hatchet (Morgan, 2001). All
these titles referred
to cultural and religious factors, leaving political explanations completely aside. In contrast to their
European counterparts, who invoked the US and European policies in the Middle East as a major source
of explanations for the attacks (see e.g. Halliday, 2001; Fisk, 2001), the US media played down all attempts to bring politics back to
the forefront. According to Thomas Friedman (2002), the ‘highjackers left no demands because they had none
at all’. In his view, these terrorists had no political demands because their real driving force was Muslim
rage against Western civilization. All the evidence pointing to the political dimensions of the attacks was
ignored if not actively deleted from the leading headlines. For instance, at the beginning of Bin Laden’s first tape relayed by al-Jazeerah, he
explicitly stated that the highjackers’ motivation was precisely ‘the 80 years of wars’ waged in the Middle
East, but the White House advised the media not to broadcast such ‘inflammatory propaganda’ and the media
agreed to edit future tapes too (Carter, 2001). Another tape released by Bin Laden, in which he explicitly affirmed that the aim of the
attacks was, among others, ‘to avenge our people killed in Palestine’ was not even aired in the USA. It came
to be known only through its publication in Europe and Blair’s mentioning it in a press conference in the States (Abrahamian,
2003: 536).8 But how can it be that a theory that has been so strongly criticized as too simplistic has become
such a successful narrative through which so many people read the contemporary world? This was the
result of a work on the narrative of the clash between civilizations that started long before September
11 and that took place, as we will see, in the media as well as in intellectual discourses and other kind of social practices. The result of
this work, which has actually intensified after 9/11, is that this narrative has become one of the most
powerful images through which people both in Western and non-Western societies perceive the world
and act within it. For instance, if by September 2001, as we have seen, European newspapers were reluctant to adopt this scheme, by
December 2004 an article appearing in The Times openly stated that ‘Islamic fundamentalism is causing a clash of
civilizations between liberal democracies and Muslims’ (Bremner, 2004). Even more striking, an Ipsos poll quoted in the
same article revealed that 48% of Italians believed that a ‘clash of civilizations’ was under way and that ‘Islam is a religion more fanatical than
any other’ (Bremner, 2004). In order to show the mechanisms through which this change has happened, one
must not only look at
what is explicitly said about the clash of civilizations and the threat of Islam. The work on myth takes
place on a much more subtle level, placed between what is consciously learned and what is unconsciously apprehended by
exposure to it. According to Seib (2004: 72), the original appeal of Huntington’s line was that it provided some parts of answers to the post-Cold
War era when uncertainty reigned about the new world order to come. In his view, the
collapse of communism left a vacuum
and both politics and the news media needed a new enemy to fill this vacuum (Seib, 2004: 76). In his analysis of
the news industry, he shows how the narrative of the clash between civilizations has provided a means to choose what to say and how to say it.
Paradoxically, he observes, precisely at the moment when Americans are fed with the images of a clash between Islam and the West, they are
left with very little information about the ‘opposing’ civilization in question. The huge drop in international news (and not just on the Middle
East) that followed the end of the Cold War9 has known only a partial and abrupt inversion as a consequence of the US attacks on Afghanistan
and the invasion of Iraq. But beyond Iraq, the networks’ international reporting was negligible. In
place of this lack of information,
people are left with a myriad of icons subtly alluding to the threat of Islam. As Geisser observed in his
analysis of the emergence of a new Islamophobia in France, the sources of the mediatic Islamophobia are not
so much explicit statements about the evils of Islam. At least in France, it is rather the case that journalists are very cautious
in their statements and even explicitly deny the paradigm of the clash. The sources of what he calls the ‘media
Islamophobia’ are the continual insistence on the ‘security ideology’ (‘idéologie sécuritaire’), i.e. the continual
assertion of the need for more security, and the parallel – only at times related to the former – ‘media demonization of Muslims’
(Geisser, 2003: 25). As he observes, ‘the media portrayal of Muslimness is mostly constrained by the prism of a radical and conflictual
Otherness; it largely plays on the repertoire of threat, when not straightforwardly that of a catastrophe’ (2003: 24).10 In this sense, images such
as the ‘Marianne voilée’, i.e. the female symbol of the French Republic wearing the Muslim veil, are much more powerful conveyers of the work
on myth than any explicit statement about the threat of Islam.11 Through an unconscious association, images such as the veiled Marianne and
the hooded Muslim with the Koran and the hatchet in his hand (Morgan, 2001) can come to coagulate and crystallize the fears and anguish that
are typical of the epoch of uncertainties (Bauman, 1999). Sometimes the
association of Islam and a threat can be more
explicit. For instance, the BBC drama series Spooks depicted a mosque in Birmingham as the home of a
terrorist cell, recruiting children to commit terrorist attacks in British schools and playgrounds. Being
conveyed by a drama series (i.e. in a programme open to all sorts of spectators, one that does not, by its very nature, call for critical discussion),
messages such as these can come to enjoy what we have called a primacy effect. By slipping into our
unconsciousness they can come to deeply influence our more basic perceptions of the world that will be
thereafter hard to dismantle. This illustrates an important point: the work on myth operates with icons, that is fragmentary and
allusive references or subtle associations of images which are apprehended through more or less conscious exposure to them. Being exposed to
such icons, they
tend to slip into our unconsciousness and to thus avoid the possibility of a critical
discourse. In this inexplicit way, for instance, medias can operate what Geisser has called the ‘mise en ordre médiatique du sens commun’,
that is, the media systematization of a general discourse about Islam which depicts it as an immutable and
conflictual bloc. According to his analysis of the French medias, this reductionist logic has brought about an ideal-type: the ‘media
Muslim’ (Homo islamicus mediaticus) who is always represented in the same postures – believers praying seen from the back, crying and
threatening compact groups, veiled women, a fanatical bearded man with an open mouth and eyes wide open (Geisser, 2003: 24).12 All these
icons are much more effective precisely because they recall by synecdoche the whole discourse about the threat of Islam. On the other hand,
another important part of this discourse stems from ideas circulating in the scholarly literature. As Tudor observed (1972), myth and theory are
not incompatible. Rather, they reciprocally sustain each other: myth provides theory with a practical impact, whereas theory, in its turn, gives
to myth an air of timeless signifi- cance. In this whole, made of theory and myth, this latter is given the chance to work at the same time as a
cognitive schema, which maps the world, as a practical image, which orients us within it, and as an image on the basis of which we feel about
the world.
Racism
Muslims portrayed as inferior, violent, and are pushed under the representation of
terrorist in discussion today
Grosfoguel in 2010 (Ramón, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California,
Berkeley, “Epistemic Islamophobia and Colonial Social Sciences” Human Architecture: Journal of the
Sociology of Self-Knowledge, http://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol8/iss2/5)
The importance of this discussion about epistemic Islamophobia is that the latter is manifested in
contemporary debates and public policy. The epistemic racism and its derivative Eurocentric fundamentalism in social theory are
manifested in discussions about human rights and democracy today. “Non-Western” epistemologies that define human
rights and human dignity in different terms than the West are considered inferior to “Western”
hegemonic definitions and, thus, excluded from the global conversation about these questions. The
underlying Western-centric view is that Muslims can be part of the discussion as long as they stop
thinking as Muslims and take the hegemonic Eurocentric liberal definition of democracy and human
rights. Any Muslim that attempts to think these questions from within the Islamic tradition is
immediately suspicious of fundamentalism. Islam and democracy or Islam and Human Rights are
considered in the hegemonic Eurocentric “common sense” an oxymoron. The stereotypes and lies
repeated over and over again in Western press and magazines ends up, like in Goebbels’ Nazi theory of propaganda, being believed
as truth. The circulation of these stereotypes contributes to the portrayal of Muslims as racially inferior,
violent creatures—thus, its easy association with “terrorism” and representation as “terrorist.”
The government follows a large amount of non-credible leads on terrorism- the
actions create a platform for prejudice and racism
Murray in 10 (Nancy, “Profiling in the age of total information awareness”, Race & Class Copyright ©
2010 Institute of Race Relations, Vol. 52(2): 3–24 10.1177/0306396810377002 http://rac.sagepub.com)
What are ‘suspicious behaviours’? Since 9/11, police have followed up on ‘tips’ they have received from
a public prone to rely on racial and religious profiling. In Massachusetts, for instance, police pursued
reports about ‘a Middle Eastern looking man who came to buy a used car and ended up not buying the
car and two Middle Eastern looking men who were seen driving a Ryder truck on the expressway’.24 The
SAR initiative may well serve as yet another ‘platform for prejudice’ that invites racial profiling.25 From
what we know of its pilot stage, it also invites the potential criminalisation of a range of innocent
behaviours and First Amendment-protected activity. The Los Angeles Police Department, a participant in
the pilot SAR project, has defined as ‘suspicious’ using binoculars in public, taking measurements, taking
pictures or video footage, taking notes and espousing ‘extremist views’.26 Under the federal
government’s definition, a ‘suspicious activity report’ is ‘official documentation of observed behaviour
that may be indicative of intelligence gathering or preoperational planning related to terrorism, criminal
or other illicit intention’.27
Terror Def = Self-serving
The definition of terrorism is based off of political legitimacy - many states partake in
in identical action with no penalties
Jackson in 2/14/08 (Richard, “The Study of Terrorism after 11 September 2001: Problems, Challenges
and Future Developments”, Political Studies Review, volume: 7, p. 171.184)
It is something of a cliché to note that terrorism
is an essentially contested concept and that there are over 200
definitions of terrorism in use in the literature. There are understandable reasons for this state of affairs. In the first place,
terrorism is not a causally coherent, free-standing phenomenon that can be defined in terms of
characteristics inherent to the violence itself. As two leading figures in the field put it, ‘The nature of
terrorism is not inherent in the violent act itself. One and the same act ... can be terrorist or not,
depending on intention and circumstance’ (Schmid and Jongman, 1988, p. 101). In this sense, terrorism is
fundamentally a social fact rather than a brute fact; the wider cultural-political meaning of terrorism is
decided through symbolic labelling, social agreement and a range of intersubjective practices (see Zulaika
and Douglass, 1996).Second, most contemporary definitions of terrorism describe it as a form of illegitimate
violence directed towards innocent civilians that is intended to intimidate or terrify an audience for
political purposes. In combination with its uncertain ontological status, the necessity of subsequently
determining what makes an act of violence legitimate or not, who 172 RICHARD JACKSON© 2009 The Author. Journal
compilation © 2009 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2009, 7(2) counts as a civilian, how innocence can be
measured, what the real intentions of often clandestine actors might be and what counts as a political
aim introduces an unbearably high level of subjectivity into the discursive field. In practice, it is often the
politically and culturally determined legitimacy of the particular group under scrutiny that determines
whether its actions are labelled as ‘terrorism’ and not the characteristics inherent to the violence itself.
Perhaps for these reasons, there are a number of problems with the way issues of definition and conceptualisation are treated in the broader
terrorism studies literature, problems that are compounded by a general reticence to tackle these difficult theoretical issues head on. Silke’s
analysis of 490 articles published in the leading terrorism studies journals between1990 and 1999, for example, revealed that only eight or 1.6
per cent of them could be regarded as conceptually oriented papers (Silke, 2004b, p. 207).This reticence to confront difficult theoretical issues
is a major obstacle to the advancement of the field. An
initial definitional problem is the selection bias of much
terrorism research whereby the terrorism label is applied almost solely to groups opposed to Western
interests and not to groups supported by Western states – even when they commit identical acts of
civilian-directed violence such as hijackings, bombings, kidnappings and assassinations (see Living-ston,
1994).Thus, while left-wing groups have always received a great deal of attention in the terrorism studies literature, right-wing groups like the
Contras, anti-Castro groups, UNITA, RENAMO, various Afghan factions and numerous Latin American death squads have remained scandalously
understudied.
No impact to terror
The threat of terrorists using Weapons of Mass Destruction are unlikely- goes against
their self-interest and is a waste of scarce resources
Jackson in 2/14/08 (Richard, “The Study of Terrorism after 11 September 2001: Problems, Challenges
and Future Developments”, Political Studies Review, volume: 7, p. 171.184)
In contrast to the dominant approach within terrorism studies, two of the featured books in this review – Goodin’s What’s Wrong with
Terrorism? and David Altheide’s Terrorism and the Politics of Fear – join a small but growing number of studies that question the accepted
knowledge and interrogate the rise and functions of a ‘politics of fear’ as seen in the popular terrorism threat narrative. Goodin, for example,
has an excellent chapter in which he dissects and deconstructs the exaggerated claims about the terrorist threat using both statistical evidence
that illustrates its extremely low risk to individual safety, as well as arguments about the current nature and processes of risk assessment. He
makes a number of insightful and frequently ignored points: given
the way people receive messages about risks and
dangers, politicians (and academics) ought to know that their warnings about terrorism and weapons of
mass destruction will be received in an ‘alarmist’ way (Goodin,2006, p. 112); there are some particular
irrationalities in risk assessments of terrorism, in part due to psychological processes, but also because
of the way the terrorist threat is constructed by the media (pp. 123–36); the argument that terrorism would be much
worse if not for all the government warnings lacks credibility given the evidence (p. 122); arguments that terrorists are likely to
employ weapons of mass destruction are not entirely convincing for reasons of rational self-interest and
practical obstacles (pp. 136–42); and applying the TERRORISM STUDIES AFTER 9/11 175© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation ©
2009 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2009, 7(2) precautionary principle to the terrorist threat results
in a number of absurdities and is a costly waste of scarce resources (pp. 142–55).
Racism
Islamophobia -> Racial Profiling
Since 9/11 racial profiling has spiked, people now believe racial profiling is necessary
for our safety, this leads to thousands of hate crimes and other forms of
discrimination. The USFG has put 12,000 people that appeared to be Muslim in
detention. The USFG constantly racially profiles. Whites are seen as individual while
Muslims are thought of as all the same.
Volpp ’02 Leti Volpp, “The Citizen and the Terrorist”, 23 Immigr. & Nat'lity L. Rev. 561 (2002), Available
at: http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/facpubs/515
In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September l1, 2001, there have been more than one thousand
incidents of hate violence reported in the United States.i How do we understand this violence, and in particular, its
emergence in a context of national tragedy? What are the seeds of this violence, and how has the political climate following September 11
allowed them to grow? Of course, there are no easy answers to these questions. I would suggest that
September 11 facilitated the
consolidation of a new identity category that groups together persons who appear "Middle Eastern,
Arab, or Muslim."2 This consolidation reflects a racialization wherein members of this group are
identified as terrorists, and are disidentified as citizens. The stereotype of the "Arab terrorist" is not an
unfamiliar one. But the ferocity with which multiple communities have been interpellated as responsible
for the events of September suggests there are particular dimensions that have converged in this
racialization. I offer three: the fact and legitimacy of racial profiling; the redeployment of old Orientalist tropes; and the relationship
between citizenship, nation, and identity. ON RACIAL PROFILING Before September 11, national polls showed such
overwhelming public opposition to racial profiling that both U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and President George W.
Bush felt compelled to condemn the practice.3 There was a strong belief that racial profiling was inefficient, ineffective, and unfair.4 This all
seems a distant memory. There
is now public consensus that racial profiling is a good thing, and in fact
necessary for survival.' There are at least five ways in which this racial profiling has been practiced against persons who appear "Middle
Eastern, Arab, or Muslim." Subsequent to September 11, over twelve hundred noncitizens have been swept up
into detention. The purported basis for this sweep is to investigate and prevent terrorist attacks, yet none of the persons
arrested and detained have been identified as engaged in terrorist activity. 6 While the government has refused to
release the most basic information about these individuals-their names, where they are held, and the immigration or criminal charges filed
against them-we know that the
vast majority of those detained appear to be Middle Eastern, Muslim, or South
Asian.7 We know, too, that the majority were identified to the government through suspicions and tips based
solely upon perceptions of their racial, religious, or ethnic identity. The U.S. Department of Justice has
also engaged in racial profiling in what has been described as a dragnet-seeking to conduct more than
five thousand investigatory interviews of male noncitizens between the ages of eighteen and thirtythree from "Middle Eastern" or "Islamic" countries or countries with some suspected tie to Al Qaeda, who
sought entry into the country since January 1, 2000, on tourist, student, and business visas. These are called voluntary interviews, yet they are
not free of coercion or consequences. 9 The Department of Justice has directed the U.S. Attorneys to have investigators report all immigration
status violations to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which includes minor visa violations. As a result, one student in Cleveland,
Ohio has been criminally charged and indefinitely detained for telling the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that he worked twenty hours per
week, when he actually worked twenty seven.' 0 Most recently, U.S. officials have announced the "Absconder Apprehension Initiative,"
whereby the Department of Justice will target for removal those noncitizens who have already received final orders of deportation but have not
yet left the country and who "come from countries in which there has been Al Qaeda terrorist presence or activity."" Thus, the government has
moved to the head of the list of an estimated 320,000 individuals with final orders of deportation those noncitizens of Middle Eastern or
Here, selective enforcement constitutes a form of racial profiling. Airport officials,
airlines, and passengers have also practiced racial profiling against those appearing "Middle Eastern,
Arab, or Muslim."' 3 Countless men have been kicked off airplanes, because airline staff and fellow
passengers have refused to fly with them on board, despite U.S. Department of Transportation directives to protect the civil
Muslim background."2
rights of passengers.' 4 And President Bush has said that he would be "madder than heck" if investigators find American Airlines racially profiled
his Arab American Secret Service agent in removing him from a flight to the Crawford ranch."i Lastly, since September 11, the general
public has engaged in extralegal racial profiling in the form of over one thousand incidents of violence
homes, businesses, mosques, temples, and gurdwaras firebombed; individuals attacked with guns,
knives, fists, and words; women with headscarves beaten, pushed off buses, spat upon; children in
school harassed by parents of other children, by classmates, and by teachers.16 We know of at least five people
who have been killed since September 11 in incidents of hate violence: a Sikh Indian, killed in Mesa, Arizona; a Pakistani Muslim killed in Dallas,
Texas; an Egyptian Coptic Christian, killed in Los Angeles, California; a Sikh Indian killed in Ceres, California; and an Indian Hindu killed near
Dallas, Texas.17 These myriad attacks have occurred, despite Bush meeting with Muslim leaders, taking his shoes
off before he visited the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., and stating that we must not target people because they belong to specific groups.'
8 His
statements have done little to disabuse people of their "common sense" understanding as to who
is the terrorist and who is the citizen. This is connected to the fact that the government has explicitly
engaged in racial profiling in terms of its targets of our "war on terrorism."' 19 Furthermore, President Bush and
other top officials have characterized the war against terrorism as a battle for "civilization"-indeed, a "crusade."' 0 While this characterization
occasionally acknowledges the heterogeneity of Muslim practices, its ideological effect is the legitimation of the religious and modem
imperative to eradicate either from without or within the forces of despotism, terror, primitivism and fundamentalism, each of which are coded
as Middle Eastern, Arab, and Muslim.2 Through these actions and these statements, the American public is being instructed that looking
"Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim" equals "potential terrorist." Despite conventional legal understandings of public versus private and the limits
of our doctrine of state action, we can conceptualize the actions of the U.S. populace, in the form of hate violence attacks, as bearing a
relationship to the explicit racial profiling by the government.22 as we know from the writings of Michel Foucault, we should understand power
not as limited to the system of "Law-and-Sovereign" and located exclusively in the state, but as far more broadly dispersed, in a triangle of
sovereignty, discipline, and government.2 3 Power is "exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile
relations."4
Simply because the state does not officially sponsor an activity does not mean that the state
does not bear a relationship to that activity.2 5 In simultaneously advocating policies of colorblindness
for citizenry while engaging in racial profiling for noncitizens, and publicly embracing all religions26
while particularly privileging Christianity,27 the administration has, in the name of democratic inclusion,
disingenuously excluded. Thus, that an epidemic of hate violence has occurred within the context of
"private" relations does not mean that such violence is without "public" origins or consequences.2 8While
the Oklahoma City bombing certainly led to enormous concern about the militia movement in the United States, there was little consolidation
of a national identity in opposition to Timothy McVeigh's terrorist attack. In contrast, post-September 11, a national identity has consolidated
that is both strongly patriotic and multiracial. The multiracial consolidation of what it means to be American was represented in a cartoon,
whereby various persons marked on their T-shirts as African American, Irish American, and Asian American dropped the hyphenated identities,
so that all in the second frame had become "American."2 9 This expansion of who is welcomed as American has occurred through its opposition
to the new construction, the putative terrorist who "looks Middle Eastern."
Other people of color have become "American"
Whites, African Americans, East Asian Americans, and Latinas/ os
are now deemed safe and not required to prove their allegiance.3° In contrast, those who inhabit the
vulnerable category of appearing "Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim" and who are thus subject to
potential profiling, have had to, as a matter of personal safety, drape their dwellings, workplaces, and
bodies with flags in an often futile attempt at demonstrating their loyalty. Racial profiling only occurs
when we understand certain groups of people to have indistinguishable members who are fungible as
potential terrorists. The Timothy McVeigh analogy helps clarify the strangeness of the present moment. Under the logic of
profiling all people who look like terrorists under the "Middle Eastern" stereotype, all whites should
have been subjected to stops, detentions, and searches after the Oklahoma City bombing and the
identification of McVeigh as the prime suspect. 31 This did not happen because Timothy McVeigh did
not produce a discourse about good whites and bad whites, 3 1 because we think of him as an individual
deviant, a bad actor. We do not think of his actions as representative of an entire racial group. This is
part and parcel of how racial subordination functions, to understand nonwhites as directed by groupbased determinism but whites as individuals. 33 Racial profiling also did not happen because, as a white
man, Timothy McVeigh was seen by many as one of "us"-as the New York Times editorialized at that time, there was
through the process of endorsing racial profiling.
"sickening evidence that the enemy was not some foreign power, but one within ourselves." 34 The ill-advised nature of racial profiling is
highlighted by the case of Richard Reid, a British citizen with a white English mother and a black Jamaican father, who attempted to light an
explosive in his shoes on a flight from Paris to Miami. He appears to have been recruited to the cause of Al Qaeda in prison.35 There was
recently an article about a French citizen killed in Afghanistan, who had been recruited in the French army, and who was a member of what
seemed to be a nouveau French foreign legion fighting with the Taliban. 36 The recruitment in prison and the recruitment in the army,
reminiscent of Timothy McVeigh, raises sharp questions about the military and prison industrial complex as sites of a particular identity
formation.37 These cases-along with the case of French citizen Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person currently facing charges in the United
States in connection to the September 11 attacks-belie the purported effectiveness of racial profiling: Not
all terrorists are persons
who appear "Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim. '38 And these cases in addition belie what sadly does not also seem to be
apparent: Very few persons who appear "Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim" are terrorists. Many men who
fall into this category, including law professors, have been subjected to questioning. One friend of this author
was profiled for reading too slowly. He was working his way through Heidegger while sitting in Newark Airport on his way to a legal history
conference, and was questioned because someone had apparently reported a "Middle Eastern looking man" engaging in the suspicious activity
of reading a book for an hour without turning the page. As Arundhati Roy has written, we are in a moment when "War is Peace, Pigs are
Horses."3 9 And reading Heidegger is a potential terrorist activity.
Epistemic Racism
Western Rationality
Islam is seen as irrational and inferior in rationalism, individuality, and science by
patriarchal social science works
Grosfoguel in 2010 (Ramón, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California,
Berkeley, “Epistemic Islamophobia and Colonial Social Sciences” Human Architecture: Journal of the
Sociology of Self-Knowledge, http://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol8/iss2/5)
Epistemic racism in the form of epistemic Islamophobia is a foundational and constitutive logic of the
modern/colonial world and of its legitimate forms of knowledge production. European humanists and
scholars since the 16th century have argued that Islamic knowledge is inferior to the West. The debate about
Moriscos in 16th century Spain were full of epistemic Islamophobic conceptions (Perceval 1992; 1997). After the expulsion of Moriscos in the
early 17th century, the inferiorization of “Moros” continued under an epistemic Islamophobic discourse. Influential
European
thinkers in the 19th century such as, for example, Ernst Renan “… argued that Islam was incompatible
with science and philosophy” (Ernst 2003: 20-21). Similarly, in social sciences we have concrete
manifestations of epistemic Islamophobia in the work of classical social theories of Western-centric patriarchal
social science such as Karl Marx and Max Weber. If we follow the logic of Weber to its final
consequences, that is, that Muslims are irrational and fatalistic people, then no serious knowledge can
come from them. What are the geopolitics of knowledge involved in Weber’s epistemic racism about Muslim people? The geopolitics of
knowledge is the German and French orientalists’ epistemic Islamophobia that is repeated in Weber’s verdict about Islam. For Weber, it
is only the Christian tradition that gives rise to economic rationalism and, thus, to Western modern
capitalism. Islam cannot compare to the “superiority” of Western values in that it lacks individuality,
rationality and science.
Muslim ideals considered barbarian and ignorant in the eyes of orientalist views which makes
even drastic opposition the same in imposing upheaval
Grosfoguel in 2010 (Ramón, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California,
Berkeley, “Epistemic Islamophobia and Colonial Social Sciences” Human Architecture: Journal of the
Sociology of Self-Knowledge, http://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol8/iss2/5)
Rational science and, its derivative, rational technology are, according to Weber, unknown to oriental
civilizations. These statements are quite problematic. Scholars such as Saliba (2007) and Graham (2006) have demonstrated
the influence of scientific developments in the Islamic World on the West, modern science and modern philosophy. Rationality was a central
tenet of the Islamic civilization. While Europe was in obscurantist feudal superstition during what is known as the Middle Ages, the school of
Baghdad was the world center of intellectual and scientific production and creativity. Weber’s
and Weberians’ Orientalist views
of Islam reproduce an epistemic Islamophobia where Muslims are incapable of producing science and of
having rationality, despite the historical evidence. But the same problem of epistemic Islamophobia we
find in Marx and Engels. Although Marx spent two months in Algiers in 1882 recovering from a sickness, he wrote almost nothing on
Islam. However, Marx had an orientalist epistemic racist view of non-Western peoples in general of which he
did write extensively (Moore 1977). Moreover, his close collaborator, Frederick Engels, did write about Muslim
people and repeated the same racist stereotypes that Marx used against “Oriental” people. Engels’s
option is quite clear: to support colonial expansion and bring Western Civilization even if it is bourgeois
and brutal in order to overcome a “barbarian” state of affairs. The superiority of the “West over the
rest” and, in particular, over Muslims is quite clear in this statement. For Marx, similar to Weber, Muslim
people from Turkish origin are a mob of ignorant people that made the mobs of the Roman Empire look
like sages. He called for a struggle of liberation against the Muslim mobs. Accordingly, for Marx, Western civilization is
superior and, thus, called to civilized the non-Western Muslims. In his perspective, better is the Western colonial
expansion rather than leaving intact in a timeless stage a barbarian inferior people. This secularist view of
Marx was a typical colonial strategy promoted by the Western Empires in order to destroy the ways of thinking
and living of the colonial subjects and, thus, impede any trace of resistance.
Social Sciences Bad
Western knowledge made normalized through expansion of Europe and the privilege
of the Western male whose “identity politics” made the knowledge universal
Grosfoguel in 2010 (Ramón, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California,
Berkeley, “Epistemic Islamophobia and Colonial Social Sciences” Human Architecture: Journal of the
Sociology of Self-Knowledge, http://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol8/iss2/5)
The epistemic privilege of the “West” was consecrated and normalized through the Spanish Catholic monarchy’s
destruction of Al-Andalus and the European colonial expansion since the late 15th century. From renaming the world with
Christian cosmology (Europe, Africa, Asia, and later, America) and characterizing all non-Christian knowledge as a product of pagan and devil
forces, to assuming
in their own Eurocentric provincialism that it is only within the Greco-Roman tradition,
passing through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Western sciences that “truth” and
“universality” is achieved, the epistemic privilege of Western, Eurocentric, male “identity politics” was
normalized to the point of invisibility as a hegemonic “identity politics.” It became the universal
normalized knowledge. In this way, all “other” traditions of thought were deemed inferior (characterized in
the 16th century as “barbarians,” in the 19th century as “primitives,” in the 20th century as “underdeveloped,” and at the beginning of the 21st
century as “anti-democratic”). Hence, since the formation of Western Liberal Social Sciences in the 19th century, both
epistemic racism
and epistemic sexism have been constitutive of its disciplines and knowledge production. Western social
sciences assume the inferiority, partiality, and the lack of objectivity in its knowledge-production of
“non-Western” knowledge and the superiority of the “West.” As a result, Western social theory is based on
the experience of 5 countries (France, England, Germany, Italy and the United States) that makes only less than 12
percent of the world population. The provincialism of Western Social Science social theory with false
claims to universality, pretends to account for the social experience of the other 88 percent of the world
population. In sum, Eurocentrism with its epistemic racism/sexism is a form of provincialism that is
reproduced inside the social sciences today.
Violent Depictions of Islam
Depictions of premodern racial and ethnic representation demonstrate the supposed
superiority of western thought—it attempts to justify its racist practices by presenting itself
as enlightened and neutral, having transgressed the “barbarity” of the past.
Lampert ‘04 [Lisa Lampert, Professor Lampert teaches literature at the University of California, Modern Language
Quarterly, 2004, “Race, Periodicity, and the (Neo-) Middle Ages” vol. 65, pg 391-421]
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_language_quarterly/v065/65.3lampert.html
In the last decade there has been a notable body of work on premodern racial and ethnic representation. In medieval studies, questions of race
and racism, anti-Semitism, and premodern colonialisms have been explored in collections such as The Postcolonial Middle Ages, edited by
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen; in the special issue on race of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, edited by Thomas Hahn; and in the
monograph Empire of Magic, by Geraldine Heng.1 Through such studies we see not only how the
concept of race has proved
central to postcolonial inquiry but also how the investigation of the early history of such concepts as
race, ethnicity, and nation opens new perspectives onto both the past and the present. Western European
Christian understandings of human difference in the Middle Ages must be viewed within broader frameworks of categorizing human groups,
that is, within discourses that were, Robert Bartlett asserts, "no more straightforward than our own."2 Medieval authors considered not only
genealogy but also elements of "environmental [End Page 391] influence," ultimately placing the greatest importance on "the cultural and
social component of ethnic identity" (45). For Bartlett, the
idea of race in the medieval period would appear much
closer to that of "ethnic group," a categorization that emphasizes linguistic, legal, political, and cultural
affinities more than somatic features as markers of racial difference. There are crucial distinctions between this type of
notion of race and those that animate, for example, the racist systems of apartheid or anti-Semitism
under national-socialism. While Bartlett rightly notes such differences in his important study The Making of Europe, he nevertheless
employs the term race, demonstrating its relation to the more "malleable" and, for the Middle Ages, more significant factors of religion, law,
language, and custom. These combined elements figured in the creation of "Europe" as a construct, or the "Europeanization of Europe" in the
Middle Ages.3 Some scholars resist the use of the term race in medieval contexts, but avoiding "semantic squabbles" by avoiding the
term race "would make a history of racism going back to the Middle Ages impossible."4 In medieval studies, scholars have attempted to write
this history, challenging traditional notions of periodization and engaging with political and theoretical debates that have relevance to the
present day. This essay similarly attempts to engage with this recent work, but by approaching the questions it raises from a somewhat
different direction. My goal is to intervene in ongoing discussions of race and periodicity, particularly vis-à-vis medieval culture, in order to
investigate the informing role of the medieval and more particularly of medievalisms in the construction, representation, and perpetuation of
modern racisms. While some medievalists have explored questions of race and racism in medieval contexts, "neomedievalists," primarily
journalists and international relations experts, have presented very different visions of the Middle Ages on the pages of Foreign Affairs, Time,
and the Atlantic. Their approaches
rely on a vision of medieval Europe that is [End Page 392] frozen within traditional
notions of periodization and that is uniformly Christian and normatively white. These representations of medieval
Europe figure integrally into some influential contemporary portrayals of concepts like "the West" and "Western civilization." For instance, John
Ganim asserts that the idea of the Middle Ages as it developed from its earliest formulations in the historical self-consciousness of Western
Europe is part of what we used to call an identity crisis, a deeply uncertain sense of what the West is and should be. The idea of the Middle
Ages as a pure Europe (or England or France or Germany) both rests on and reacts to an uncomfortable sense of instability about origins, about
what the West is and from where it came.5 Ganim's
insight into the representation of medieval Europe as "pure" is
extremely important. Alongside the stereotyped portrait of the Middle Ages as a backward, brutal
period exists an idealized nostalgia inflected by notions of racial and religious purity. This vision of a
simplified, sanitized Middle Ages is at work in neomedievalist writings, which have grown out of another
Western identity crisis, the struggle to understand the West's place in the world order following the
collapse of communism. Before turning to these more popular politicized conceptions, I examine how the Middle Ages has figured into
some prominent theoretical discussions of the history of the concept of race, such as those by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Etienne Balibar. I
then turn to two literary texts that furnish striking representations of religious difference linked to somatic difference: Wolfram von
Eschenbach's Parzival and the Middle English romance The King of Tars. These texts help illuminate the tangled relationships between
theological and biological (or, more accurately, pseudobiological) notions of race in both the premodern and the modern eras. Indeed, they
demonstrate important connections between premodern and modern conceptions of race. Grasping these connections will not only enable a
more comprehensive understanding of the history of the concept but also help dispel the vision of a homogeneous European past that
continues to inform a wide range of influential and popular conceptions of "the West" and [End Page 393] "the rest," including prominent
political analyses such as Samuel P. Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis. Generalized discussions of the concept of race tend to give only
the most cursory notice to medieval texts and contexts, if they consider them at all. Influential discussions of the concept and its historical
development continue to be structured around limiting traditional periodizations. An often-cited example is Appiah's essay "Race." An elegant,
important essay in many ways, it stands out because it avoids the medieval-early modern divide by avoiding the "Middle Ages" altogether.
Appiah argues that "ethnographic"
notions of difference existed in the traditions "of the classical Greeks and
the ancient Hebrews" but were unlike nineteenth-century "racialist" schemas, which were heavily
influenced by the idea of "the nation."6 Appiah examines the "long process of transition from the views of the ancient world" to
"racialism" by reference to early modern drama (277). The figures of "the Moor" and "the Jew" in the plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare were
not, he claims, based on actual information gleaned from contact with the few blacks and Jews present in England at the time: "Rather, it seems
that the stereotypes were based on an essentially theological conception of the status of both Moors and Jews as non-Christians; the former
distinguished by their black skin, whose color was associated in Christian iconography with sin and the devil; the latter by their being, as
Matthew's account of the crucifixion suggests, 'Christ-killers'" (277-78). Because of their "theological" basis, Appiah finds that "Elizabethan
stereotypes" differ from later racialist ones in that they represent somatic difference as only an indication, not the root, of deficiency in beliefs
or morals (278).
Cultural Racism
Islamophobia has shifted from biological racism to cultural racism. Cultural racism
attempts to cover up racism by normalizing and institutionalizing racism, but it still
dehumanizes non-Europeans. France has a law against hijabs and Belgian refers to
Muslims as foreigners. We still operate under white supremacy and white affirmative
action. The media’s representation of Muslims as terrorists increased after 9/11, but
began decades before.
Grosfoguel et al ’06 Grosfoguel, Ramón and Mielants, Eric (2006) "The Long-Durée Entanglement
Between Islamophobia and Racism in the Modern/ Colonial Capitalist/Patriarchal World-System: An
Introduction," Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge: Vol. 5: Iss. 1, Article 2.
In the last 60 years there has been a historical transformation in racist discourses. While biological racist
discourses declined, cultural racism became the hegemonic form of racism in the late world-system (Grosfoguel 2003). The defeat of
Nazi Germany, the anti-colonial struggles and the civil rights movements of colonial minorities inside the
Western empires created the historical and political conditions for the transition from biological racism
to cultural racism. The white elites of the world-system did not give up on their racism. They simply
shifted the meanings and discourses of “race” in response to the challenges from the struggles of
colonized people. Cultural racism is a form of racism that does not even mention the word “race.” It is
focused on the cultural inferiority of a group of people. Usually it is framed in terms of the inferior
habits, beliefs, behaviors, or values of a group of people. It is close to biological racism in the sense that cultural racism
naturalizes/essentializes the culture of the racialized/inferiorized people. The latter are often represented as fixed in
a timeless space. In the new cultural racist discourses, religion has a dominant role. The contemporary tropes about
“uncivilized,” “barbarian,” “savage,” “primitive,” “underdeveloped,” “authoritarian,” and “terrorist”
inferior people are today concentrated in the “other’s” religious practices and beliefs. By focusing on the
“other’s” religion, the Europeans, Euro-Americans and Euro-Israelis manage to escape being accused of racism. However, when we carefully
examine the hegemonic rhetoric in place, the tropes are a repetition of old biological racist discourses and the people who are the target of
Islamophobic discourses are the traditional colonial subjects of the Western Empires, that is, the “usual suspects.” Only within the outlined long
durée of historical continuities together with the recent hegemony of cultural racism can we understand the relationship between
Islamophobia and racism today. It
is absolutely impossible to de-link the hate or fear against Muslims from
racism against non-European people. Islamophobia and cultural racism are entangled and overlapping
discourses. The association of Muslims with the colonial subjects of Western empires in the minds of white populations is simply a given in
the core of the “modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system.” This links Islamophobia to an old colonial racism that
is still alive in the world today, especially in the metropolitan centers. In Great Britain, Muslims are associated with Egyptians,
Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (subjects from old British colonies); thus Islamophobia in Britain is associated with anti-Black, anti-Arab and antiSouth Asian racism. In France, Muslims are mostly North Africans (from old colonies such as Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, etc.). In The
Netherlands, Muslims are mostly ‘guest workers’ and colonial migrants coming from Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia and Suriname so Islamophobia
in The Netherlands is associated with racism against guest worker migrants and old colonial subjects. In Belgium, 90% of the
Belgian
population uses the term ‘vreemdelingen’ or ‘étrangers’ (‘foreigners’) to refer specifically to Moroccan, Turkish or Arab
immigrants, i.e., cultural others that can be defined as Muslims (Billiet & Carton & Huys 1990:432). In Germany, Islamophobia is associated
with antiTurk racism, and in Spain with anti-Moor racism. Thus Islamophobia as a fear or hatred of Muslims is associated with anti-Arab, antiAsian, and anti-Black racism. Similarly, in
the United States, Islam is associated with African-Americans—most notably the
Nation of Islam—and Arabs of all ethnicities. Puerto Ricans as colonial subjects of the U.S. empire are suspicious subjects in the
Islamophobic hysteria1 and the fact that Latinos are one of the largest growing populations of converts to Islam in the U.S. is also an issue. After
9/11, many conservative politicians and American media outlets, such as commentator Lou Dobbs on CNN, associated illegal immigrants with
terrorism and national security problems, encouraging, if not leading to, the increased militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border. The latter will
likely only lead to more economic refugees dying in the desert. It does not matter if the Western domestic political system is the British
multicultural model or the French Republican model— neither is working. Unable to overcome the problem of racial discrimination, racism
becomes a corrosive process that ends up destroying the abstract ideals of each model. In
the case of the Anglo-American
world, multiculturalism and diversity operate to conceal white supremacy. The racial minorities are
allowed to celebrate their history, traditions and identity as long as they leave intact the white
supremacy’s racial/ethnic hierarchy of the status quo. The dominant system in the United Kingdom, Canada and the
United States is an institutionalized and concealed “white affirmative action” that benefits whites on a
daily basis and at all levels of social existence. It is so powerful that it has become normalized to the
point of not being stated as such. In the French Republican model, the formal system of equality operates with an institutionalized
and normalized “communautarisme masculin blanc.” If racial/gender/ sexual minorities protest discrimination, they are
accused by the “communautaristes masculin blanc” in power to be acting as “communautaristes” as if the elites in power were racial and
gender blind/neutral, behaving towards everybody with a “universal principle of equality.” White supremacy in France operates within the
myth of a “racially blind society.” “Racially-blind
racism” is institutionalized and normalized in France to the point
that makes discriminatory “communautarisme masculin blanc” invisible. Islamophobia is a case in point. The so called neutrality of
the West is contradicted when Muslims affirm their practices and identities in the public sphere and when they make claims of discrimination in
education or the labor market as citizens with equal rights within Western states. The
veil law in France against Muslim
women’s use of the veil in public institutions or the incarceration without due procedure and torture of
thousands of Muslims in the United States are just recent instances in a long list of grievances. At a
world level, Islamophobia has been the dominant discourse used in the post-civ- il rights and post-independence
era of dominant cultural racist discourses against Arabs. The events of 9/11 escalated anti-Arab racism through an
Islamophobic hysteria all over the world, specifically among the dominant elites of the United States and Israel.
The latter is not surprising given U.S. and Israeli representation of Palestinians, Arabs and Islamic people in general as
terrorists decades before 9/11 (Said 1979, 1981). The responsibility of U.S. foreign policy is never linked to the tragic events of 9/11.
The U.S. Cold War against the “Evil Empire” in Afghanistan during the 1980s financed, supported and created a global network of Islamic
fundamentalist terrorist groups, then known as “Freedom Fighters,” that came back to haunt them on 9/11 (Johnson 2006). The U.S. was
complicit in Osama Bin-Laden’s and Al Qaeda’s operations as part of the CIA’s global/imperial designs and operations against the Soviet Union
back in the 1980s. However, it is easier to blame Arab people and use racist Islamophobic arguments rather than to critically examine U.S.
foreign policy over the past 50 years. The same applies to Saddam Hussein, who was a loyal U.S. ally and fought dirty wars, supported by the
CIA, against Iran following U.S. imperial/global designs during the 1980s. Yet he was later declared a U.S. enemy and falsely accused by the U.S.
elites to have links to Al Qaeda in order to justify a long-planned war against Iraq (Risen 2006). It is symptomatic that in most Western
countries, Arabs are still perceived as if they were “the majority of Muslims in the world” even though they are only 1/5 of the world’s total
Muslim population. This is related to Western global/imperial designs for domination and exploitation of oil in the Middle East and Arabs’
resistance against it (Harvey 2003). The
long term exaggerated image of Arabs as terrorists and violent in Western
media (newspapers, movies, radio, television, etc.) has been fundamental to the new wave of anti-Arab
racism linked to an Islamophobic discourse through cultural racism before and after 9/11 (Said 1981). It is not
accidental that Anti-Arab racism accounts for most Islamophobia in the West. Even Muslims from South Asia and African origin living in the
West get part of the heat of the anti-Arab racism, especially in the United States (Salaita 2006).
Leads to Human/Inhuman Binary
Epistemic racism creates the idea that Islam is non-human and that the West is
privileged
Grosfoguel in 2010 (Ramón, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California,
Berkeley, “Epistemic Islamophobia and Colonial Social Sciences” Human Architecture: Journal of the
Sociology of Self-Knowledge, http://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol8/iss2/5)
However, epistemic
racism is the foundational form and older version of racism in that the inferiority of
“non-Western” people as below the human (non-humans or subhumans) is defined on their closeness to
animality and the latter is defined on the basis of their inferior intelligence and, thus, lack of rationality. Epistemic
racism operates through the privileging of an essentialist (“identity”) politics of “Western” male elites, that is, the
hegemonic tradition of thought of Western philosophy and social theory that almost never includes “Western” Women and never includes “nonWestern”
philosophers/philosophies and social scientists .
In this tradition, the “West” is considered to be the only legitimate
tradition of thought able to produce knowledge and the only one with access to “universality,”
“rationality” and “truth.” Epistemic racism considers “non-Western” knowledge to be inferior to
“Western” knowledge. Since epistemic racism is entangled with epistemic sexism, Western centric social
science is a form of epistemic racism/sexism that privilege “Western” male’s knowledge as the superior
knowledge in the world today. If we take the canon of thinkers privileged within Western academic disciplines, we can observe that without
exception they privilege “Western” male thinkers and theories, above all those of European and Euro-North-American males. This hegemonic
essentialist “identity politics” is so powerful and so normalized—through the discourse of “objectivity”
and “neutrality” of the Cartesian “ego-politics of knowledge” in the social sciences—that it hides who
speaks and from which power location they speak from, such that when we think of “identity politics”
we immediately assume, as if by “common sense,” that we are talking about racialized minorities. In
fact, without denying the existence of essentialist “identity politics” among racialized minorities, the
hegemonic “identity politics”—that of Eurocentric male discourse—uses this identitarian, racist, sexist
discourse to discard all critical interventions rooted in epistemologies and cosmologies coming from
oppressed groups and “non-Western” traditions of thought (Maldonado-Torres 2008). Through the myth of the “ego-politics of
knowledge” (which in reality always speaks through a “Western” male body and a Eurocentric geopolitics of knowledge) critical voices coming from
individuals and groups inferiorized and subalternized by this hegemonic epistemic racism and epistemic
sexism are denied and discarded as particularistic. If epistemology has color—as African philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (1997)
points out so well— and has gender/color—as African-American Sociologist Patricia Hills Collins (1991) has argued—then the Eurocentric
epistemology that dominates the social sciences has both color and gender. The construction of the
epistemology of “Western” males as superior and the rest of the world as inferior forms an inherent
part of the epistemological racism/sexism which has prevailed in the world-system for more than 500
years.
A2: Islam = Patriarchal
Westerners making the arg that Islam abuses women is hypocritical- they do it too,
the Bible oppresses women just as much as the Koran, but the Koran’s sexism is
frequently represented in the press while there is silence about Bible’s sexism. This is
an ideological justification for imperialism, and was used by the Bush administration
to justify war in Afghanistan. It’s a battle of one patriarchy against the other.
Patriarchy isn’t integral to Islam, it’s an external force.
Grosfoguel et al ’06 Grosfoguel, Ramón and Mielants, Eric (2006) "The Long-Durée Entanglement
Between Islamophobia and Racism in the Modern/ Colonial Capitalist/Patriarchal World-System: An
Introduction," Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge: Vol. 5: Iss. 1, Article 2.
ISLAMOPHOBIA AS ORIENTALISM One
of the cultural racist arguments used against Islamic people today is their
“patriarchal and sexist abuses of women.” As part of the construction of Islamic people as inferior in relation to the West, an
important argument to sustain their “uncivilized” and “violent” values/behavior is the oppression of women at the hands of men. It is ironic to
hear Western patriarchal and Christian conservative fundamentalist figures talk as if they were the defenders of feminism when they talk about
Islam. George W. Bush’s main argument to invade Afghanistan was the need to liberate brown women from the atrocities of brown men. The
hypocrisy of the argument is clear when the Bush Administration has been actively defending Christian
patriarchal fundamentalism, opposing abortion and women’s civil/social rights during the past years in
the United States, while using a women’s rights argument against the Taliban’s to invade Afghanistan.
The rhetoric of “white men as saviors of women of color from colored men’s patriarchal abuses” actually
goes back to colonial times. It has historically served to conceal the real reasons behind the colonization
of the non-West. We now know that one of the real reasons behind the Bush Administration’s invasion of Afghanistan was its
geopolitical strategic location and importance in terms of proximity to oil and gas in South Asia and not the desire to liberate the women of the
region from the barbaric practices of the Taliban. Otherwise, why didn’t the U.S. do anything earlier? Immediately after the invasion, occupied
Afghanistan provided legal permission to gas and oil transnational companies to built pipelines over its territory (Rashid 2001). In addition, the
symbolic value of a speedy military victory accomplished by superior Western firepower against Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan (2001),
right on the Iranian border, should also not be underestimated.
In the Western media, Islamophobic representations of
Muslim people as savages in need of Western civilizing missions is the main narrative used to cover-up
or ignore global/imperial military and economic designs. The impact of patriarchy on a fundamentalist
interpretation of religious texts is not unique to Islam. We can see similar abuses against women held
among fundamentalist Christian (Catholic and Protestants) or Jewish men. You can find as many
patriarchal and sexist arguments in the Bible as in the Koran. However, the sexist and patriarchal
characterization of Islam is what is represented in the press while there is practically silence about the
patriarchal oppression of women sustained and practiced by Judaism and Christianity in the West. It is
important to note that Islam was the first religion in the world to grant women the right to divorce more than one thousand years ago. The
Christian world only granted women the right to divorce in the late 20th century and the Catholic Church and some countries still do not
recognize it. This is not to justify patriarchal abuses of some Muslim men over women, but to question the stereotypical racial representation
that only represents Muslim men as those who abuse women around the world. This
Islamaphobic argument is incoherent,
inconsistent and false. It only serves Western global/imperial designs. Thus, what we have in the world
today is not a clash of civilizations but a clash of fundamentalisms (Ali 2002) and a clash of patriarchies. The
Bush administration has defended Christian fundamentalist arguments to characterize the “Islamic enemy” as a part of the old crusade wars,
while Islamic fundamentalists use a similar language (Ibid). The former, in the name of civilization and progress, defends a Western form of
patriarchy with the monogamist family at its center, while the latter defends a non-Western form of patriarchy with polygamy authorized as
central to the family structure. However, as
Islamic feminist have sustained, patriarchal versions of Islam are not
inherently Islamic but represent the colonization of Islam by patriarchy (Mernisi 1987). The interpretation of
the original sacred scriptures where hijacked by men throughout the history of Islam. The same thing
could be said of the Jewish and Christian sacred texts. Interpretations were controlled by patriarchal
interpretations of the scriptures as the dominant perspective in these world religions. Therefore, there
is no “patriarchy” as a single system in the world-system today, but “patriarchies” in the sense of several
systems of gender domination of men over women. The patriarchal system that was globalized in the present world-system
is to a certain degree the Western Christian form of patriarchy. Non-Western forms of patriarchy have co-existed with the West in the
peripheral regions of the world-system and in many epochs of colonial history the West was complicit with them in their colonial/imperial
projects.
To talk as if patriarchy, as a system of gender domination, is external to the West and located in
Islam is a historical Orientalist distortion that goes back to Western representations of Islam in the 18th
century. European colonial expansion has exported not only capital and militarism but also patriarchy
around the world, and often used as well as reinforced local patriarchies in the periphery in the service of its imperial strategy. It is
important to keep in mind that Orientalist views are characterized by racist, exotic and inferior essentialist representations of Islam as frozen in
time (Said 1979). These Orientalist representations of Islam after the 18th century were preceded by three hundred years of Occidentalism (the
belief in superiority of the West over the rest) from the late 15th century until the emergence of Orientalism in the 18th century (Mignolo
2000). The historical and political conditions for the emergence of Orientalism are located within Occidentalism.
Solvency
Policy Action
First Amendment Prohib
We need prohibition on surveillance of first amendment activities. The FBI and local
departments receiving federal aid should follow a guideline of reasonable suspicion
Fisher 4 Linda E. Fisher Nov. 5, 2004 (Assistant Professor in Residence at University of Connecticut) “GUILT BY EXPRESSIVE ASSOCIATION:
POLITICAL PROFILING, SURVEILLANCE AND THE PRIVACY OF GROUPS” ARIZONA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 46:621
While limitations on surveillance cannot unduly restrict the Government’s ability to conduct necessary intelligence-gathering, requiring
a
reasonable suspicion of criminal activity before investigating First Amendment activity can help achieve
a suitable balance between national security interests and associational rights.30 This evidence of
criminal activity supplies the compelling state interest that justifies narrowly tailored investigations.
Thus, protection of national security can coexist with civil liberties, and political profiling can be
eliminated when investigations are premised upon a legitimate law enforcement purpose, rather than
on protected beliefs. In fact, the thesis of this Article is that the Constitution should prohibit domestic surveillance
of U.S. persons’ First Amendment activity31 in the absence of a reasonable suspicion of criminal
activity.32 Politically motivated investigations are not permissible, since the mission of law enforcement
is to enforce the criminal laws, not to monitor political or religious expression. The history and purposes
of the constitutional right of association corroborate this conclusion.33 A consent decree that essentially adopts the
approach I endorse was recently entered in a political surveillance lawsuit against the Denver Police Department.34 In addition, the
reasonable suspicion standard should be adopted— or retained—in legislation, regulations, and
guidelines that apply to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. This standard remains for police
departments accepting federal aid.35 The FBI’s guidelines on domestic terrorism investigations employed the standard, or its
substantial equivalent, for twenty-six years, before severely curtailing its use.36 The Church Committee Report recommended employing the
standard in terrorism investigations as early as 1976.37 In
light of the Supreme Court’s current conception of the
constitutional right of association, the legal arguments favoring restraints on political surveillance are
stronger than ever. Those legal restraints should now be strengthened, rather than removed.
The right of association is key to all other 1st amendment rights- speech and religion
lose meaning without community. The right also creates a buffer between the state
and individual and enhances democracy
Fisher 4 Linda E. Fisher Nov. 5, 2004 (Assistant Professor in Residence at University of Connecticut) “GUILT BY EXPRESSIVE ASSOCIATION:
POLITICAL PROFILING, SURVEILLANCE AND THE PRIVACY OF GROUPS” ARIZONA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 46:621
Freedom of speech and religion are largely collective rights, requiring association for their full expression.
Therefore, courts also take account of the inherently communal nature of human social, political, and
spiritual life in construing the right of association.117 As social creatures, we develop and express our identities
and character in community by relating and reacting to each other. This right corresponds to the political philosopher Isaiah
Berlin’s notion of positive liberty, or the right to affirmative development of the self.118 It follows that many important
religious practices and rituals take place communally as well. Politics is similarly a collective endeavor, almost by
definition. Few individuals can influence government or the course of public life alone. Nonetheless, in the last century, courts and
commentators often have focused solely on the individual aspects of First Amendment rights, losing sight of
the role of community in expressive activity.119 As a result, associational rights sometimes have seemed anomalous within the overall
constitutional framework. But expanding one’s frame of reference to include the relational aspects of expressio n,
as well as the individual, restores perspective on the role of the individual within the larger political and
religious community.120 More generally, participation in intermediate associations enhances democracy in a
number of ways: it reduces alienation by cementing bonds between people, it trains citizens for democratic
participation, and it gives them influence over group expression and action, thereby inculcating civic virtue. It
also enhances popular sovereignty by amplifying the individual voice, joining it to that of the larger
group.121 In addition, associations provide a buffer between individuals and the State, and help prevent the
State from exerting overweening power against individuals.122 Consistent with this insight, the Supreme Court has
elevated associational rights to a more central role within First Amendment doctrine.123 The privacy protection function of the right—whether
expressive or intimate—also recognizes that
government’s gathering or revealing of personal information unduly
chills association as a foundational breeding ground of democracy (or intimate association as an exercise of freedom).
Self-consciousness and fear of disclosure of personal information inhibit the freedom that Isaiah Berlin dubbed negative
liberty, or the right to be left alone.124 The aggregation of individual members’ fears inevitably affects the vitality and autonomy
of the group. Briefly, constitutional history indicates the importance of community and association to the
political debates occurring at the time of the framing. Although the federalists generally proceeded from the individualistic
Enlightenment tradition,125 the antifederalists, or republicans, derived many of their views from European republican theory.126 The
antifederalists focused on the common good and the effects of institutions—both governmental and intermediate nongovernmental groups—
in shaping individual lives.127 Believing that government should support character development, the antifederalists “were the force that
galvanized support for the inclusion of a Bill of Rights—ironically, a document most often interpreted through the language of
individualism.”128 Thus, concerns for association and its benefits informed the development of the First Amendment from the beginning.129
Because association is central to American democracy and its constitutional framework, it is imperative
to maintain a vigorous right of association in order fully to protect First Amendment activities.130 In the
absence of a strong right of association, not only individual civil liberties, but also the stability of intermediate groups, a fundamental pillar of
our system, is in jeopardy.131 The critical
need to ferret out terrorism cannot be allowed to collapse the
necessary tension between First Amendment freedoms and protecting the national security. As will be
demonstrated infra, the two interests can be accommodated and balanced in a fashion that respects both
and enhances the efficiency of law enforcement.132
FBI Oversight
Vigorous oversight should be enacted over the FBI after the investigation of those only on the base of
profiling
Berman in 2011 (Emily, Counsel in the Liberty and National Security Project at the Brennan Center for
Justice, “DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE: NEW POWERS, NEW RISKS”, Brennan Center for Justice,
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/AGGReportFINALed.pdf)
Civil liberties—such as privacy and freedom of expression, association, and religion—are often curtailed.
In the wake of 9/11, government action exhibited this tendency across a wide range of counterterrorism
policies. The Guidelines, implemented by Attorney General Michael Mukasey in December 2008, are
considerably more permissive than earlier versions implemented by previous Attorneys General. This
permissiveness raises two concerns First, the Guidelines expand the FBI’s discretion to investigate individuals and
groups while simultaneously limiting oversight requirements and thereby risk opening the door to
invasions of privacy and the use of profiling on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, or
political ideology. In so doing they also risk chilling constitutionally protected activities. Second, the Guidelines
could render the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts less effective. These changes are not merely cosmetic They grant the FBI license to
employ intrusive techniques to investigate Americans when there is no indication that any wrongdoing
has taken place. This means that FBI agents can collect and retain vast amounts of information, much of
it about the innocent activities of law-abiding Americans. And it can then retain that information indefinitely and share it
.
.
with other government agencies. It is thus crucial to ensure that sufficient limits, as well as meaningful internal and external checks, are
imposed on this power. We cannot know how much of this information-collection occurs, or how frequently it leads to the identification and
neutralization of threats. But what we do know is that the Guidelines grant government officials significant discretion in making investigative
decisions. In
the absence of meaningful limitations on the FBI’s authority, agents or informants may attend
religious services or political gatherings to ascertain what is being preached and who is attending. They
may focus their attention on particular religious or ethnic communities. They may gather and store in their
databases information about where individuals pray, what they read, and who they associate with. All with no reason to suspect
criminal activity or a threat to national security. And then they may keep that information in their
databases, regardless of whether it indicated any wrongdoing. Congress and the Justice Department
should act to ensure vigorous oversight of the Guidelines’ use. There must be meaningful internal and
external checks on the vast powers the FBI have been granted. The following recommendations would
accomplish this goal: 1. Restore the requirements of prior approval for initiating, conducting, and
continuing or extending investigations as well as durational limits on investigations to the Guidelines. The FBI’s history
proves that, even acting in good faith and with the best of intentions, FBI agents will not infrequently
venture beyond the limits of their powers. Since the Guidelines inception, they have relied on prior authorization requirements
Both
,
•
•
and durational limits to guard against the risk of improper use of investigations or investigative techniques. In jettisoning these safeguards, the
2008 Guidelines increase both the likelihood and frequency of violations.
Congress should implement a robust system of oversight, require previous writing to be kept on
record, and review effectiveness of investigations and guidelines to stop FBI breaking of guidelines
Berman in 2011 (Emily, Counsel in the Liberty and National Security Project at the Brennan Center for
Justice, “DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE: NEW POWERS, NEW RISKS”, Brennan Center for Justice,
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/AGGReportFINALed.pdf)
Both Congress and the Justice Department should act to ensure vigorous oversight of the Guidelines’
use. There must be meaningful internal and external checks on the vast powers the FBI have been granted.
The following recommendations would accomplish this goal: 2. Require records of prior approval to be in
writing and kept on record. • A recordkeeping requirement both encourages better compliance with
supervisory approval obligations and creates a data trail to facilitate internal and external reviews of the FBI’s use of its authorities. 3.
Implement a robust system of oversight and review of the Guidelines’ implementation and efficacy within the
Justice Department. • Under the Patriot Act reauthorizations in 2005, the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector
General (OIG) is required to review “the effectiveness and use, including any improper or illegal use, of
national security letters issued by the Department of Justice.”287 • A similar requirement should be enacted for
review of the Guidelines. The Department of Justice Inspector General—in consultation with the Privacy and Civil
Liberties Oversight Board— should prepare and release annually a report about how the Guidelines are being
used. The Inspector General must be given full access to all relevant information, as well as the authority to interview FBI officials. • Like the
NSL audits, the report should include “an examination of the use” of the Guidelines; “a description of
any noteworthy facts or circumstances, including any improper or illegal use” of Guidelines’ authorities; and “an
examination of the effectiveness of the Guidelines,” including the importance of the information
acquired, the manner such information is collected, retained, analyzed, and disseminated, whether and how
often the Department of Justice used such information either to produce an analytical intelligence product or in criminal proceedings, and
how often each investigative technique was employed.288 • Note that OIG review of the FBI’s use of NSLs has been
extraordinarily effective in identifying violations and recommending means to avoid such violations in the future. • A classified version of this
report should be made available to all Members of Congress; a public version that provides aggregate numbers should also be released. 4.
Congressional Review. • Congress
also should exercise vigorously its oversight authority to police the FBI’s use
of ts authorities. Congress has multiple tools at its disposal to do so. It can hold oversight hearings—in fact,
congressional committees regularly hold hearings related to oversight of the FBI. The use and effectiveness of the Guidelines should figure
more prominently in those hearings, or separate hearings should be scheduled. Congress
also could choose to task the
General Accounting Office (GAO) with responsibility for conducting audits of the FBI’s use of the
Guidelines. While the GAO has statutory authority to access data, documents, and personnel, the FBI is not always entirely cooperative.289
FBI officials must insist that employees cooperate fully with any congressional or GAO reviews.
Critical Solvency
Praxis Key
Criticisms must include policy actions and vice versa. The tensions between critical
and traditional terror studies make both better and help us understand terror and
counter terror violence.
Gunning 7
Jeroen Gunning. Gunning is deputy director of the Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and
Contemporary Political Violence at the University of Wales. “A Case for Critical Terrorism Studies?”,
Government and Opposition, Volume 42, Issue 3, pages 390–393, Summer 2007,
There is, of course, a tension between the two functions of the proposed ‘critical turn’. As a means to bring
together divergent voices, it demands the absence of a narrowing normative straitjacket. As a remedy for the
shortcomings of ‘traditional’ perspectives, it demands an explicitly ‘critical’ approach with an emphasis on policy
relevance, which I have sought to capture in the notion of ‘emancipation’. Because of this, a critically
constituted field may collapse from its own internal tensions. An overly inclusive field may dissolve because it has too
little in common or because it is too eclectic to constitute a field.105 An overly normative field risks isolating itself by being too exclusionary. In
either case, though,
the ‘critical turn’ is likely to render the definitional debate that has tormented ‘terrorism
studies’ for so long partially obsolete by refocusing the debate on the wider context, and the power
structures behind discourse. The explicit pursuit of a ‘critical turn’ may also exacerbate the tension between ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’
approaches. However, this is not a reason for rejecting a ‘critical turn’ and could in fact be turned into a creative tension. Tensions
between ‘traditional terrorism studies’ and ‘critical’ or cognate approaches already exist. A selfconscious ‘critical turn’ does not have to exacerbate this situation if it is executed sensitively, by
emphasizing the need for inclusion and cooperation rather than simply highlighting the shortcomings of
‘traditional’ approaches. ‘Traditional terrorism studies’ have produced a wealth of descriptive data and
analysis, and not to acknowledge this would weaken the ‘critical’ project which should complement
rather than supplant ‘traditional’ approaches.106 ‘Critical’ approaches must in turn be challenged by
‘traditional’ perspectives, to keep them focused on the need for policy relevance and to (re)-consider
the benefits of the status quo. At the same time, not considering the ‘critical turn’ will be highly costly in
terms of knowledge lost through fragmentation and lack of ‘critical’ exposure. From both a conceptual and a
policy-relevance perspective, the statist focus and ahistoricity of ‘problem-solving’ approaches to the study of
‘terrorism’, as well as the methodological implications of these characteristics, must be overcome if the quality of research
and policy recommendations is to improve. Similarly, for ‘knowledge’ (and ‘knowledge’ about the conditions of this
‘knowledge’) to be expanded, the many fragmented voices of those studying aspects of ‘terrorism’ outside
the ‘traditional terrorism field’ should be brought together under one umbrella to enable the confluence
of disparate insights, and to facilitate the cross-fertilization between ‘traditional terrorism studies’,
‘critical terrorism studies’ and cognate disciplines.107 Existing ‘terrorism’ journals can facilitate such a ‘critical turn’ by
encouraging the submission of more critically constituted papers, identifying gaps in, and shortcomings of, research to date, and consciously
seeking to fill them (a process that is already, tentatively, underway).108 Alone, however, that is unlikely to be sufficient. New outlets should be
created with the specific aim of encouraging both ‘critical’ perspectives, and critically conceived ‘traditional’ approaches. The recently
conceived Journal of Critical Studies on Terrorism is a case in point. Encouraging journals from cognate disciplines to issue special editions in
partnership with scholars from within the ‘terrorism field’ is another way forward, as is the organization of explicitly interdisciplinary
conferences that seek to engage scholars from beyond the ‘terrorism field’. The creation of university courses that critically engage both
‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ perspectives on ‘terrorism’ is similarly essential, as is the establishment of research centres that facilitate both ‘critical’
and critically conceived ‘traditional’ research on ‘terrorism’.109 The creation of an explicitly differentiated ‘critical terrorism studies’ field offers
the advantage of facilitating both an explicitly ‘critical’ research on ‘terrorism’, and the in-gathering of all those cognate voices that are wary of
being identified with ‘traditional terrorism studies’ (although it remains to be seen whether they are willing to identify with a ‘critical terrorism
studies’ field). However, the establishment of such a separate field runs the risk of suggesting that only ‘critical terrorism’ scholars must reflect
on their methodology and their assumptions. Each of the problems discussed above should concern all who study ‘terrorism’, regardless of
whether they have adopted a ‘problem-solving’ or a ‘critical’ approach. The very fact that the need for a ‘critical turn’ is discussed, accompanied
by the establishment of journals and centres that encourage a more ‘critical’ approach to ‘terrorism’, should contribute to making ‘terrorism
studies’ as a whole more self-reflexive and ‘critical’. However, whether a ‘critical turn’ will in fact materialize, and whether it will succeed in
bringing on board both ‘wary’ scholars from cognate disciplines and the more self-reflexive ‘traditional’ scholars, depends, not just on how the
‘critical turn’ is managed, but on each scholar involved in ‘terrorism research’ – ‘traditional’, ‘critical’ or cognate.
The current state of
affairs is untenable. ‘Terrorism’ and counter-terrorism measures kill and harm real people in real places.
How we understand these phenomena, and how we address them, is too important to be left to chance.
What is needed is a respectful but candid conversation both within ‘terrorism studies’ and with cognate
fields, policy makers and ‘suspect communities’ about making ‘terrorism research’ more self-reflexive
and critical while remaining policy relevant.
Criticism Key
The symbolic power felt by the political myth grows stronger the longer it is allowed
to be subconsciously engrained. Engagement in critical discussion is key to break away
from the mythical construct of reality that permeates all the dimensions of power.
Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE AND EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE, FLORENCE, ITALY (‘Rethinking
Political Myth: The Clash of Civilizations as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy’, 2006, European Journal of Social Theory 9(3): 315–336))
Finally,
if power is the ability to influence another person and make him or her do, or not do, what he or
she otherwise would not, or would, have done, then it is clear that the most effective power is the
power that can be felt without being seen. In this sense, symbolic power, defined as the power to
construct a successful version of reality, permeates all the dimensions of power – political, ideological
and economic, without it being possible to treat them without taking this symbolic dimension into
consideration. In particular, today more than ever it seems that control over the means for physical coercion goes hand in hand with (and
is quite often even overcome by) the greater role played by the control of the means of interpretation. In other words, politics seems to
be increasingly about a struggle for people’s imagination rather than a struggle for the legitimate use of
physical coercion. An important part of this struggle is played through the work on myth. However, as Spinoza pointed out a long time
ago (1951), if all societies have an unavoidable imaginative dimension, what they differ in is the degree to which political imagination is
subjected to open critical discussion.22 This does not mean that myth and reason are mutually exclusive and incompatible, as an ‘enlightened’
approach assumes. It simply means that there are conditions that can help or prevent the development of a critique.23 What are the conditions
that in the present situation can favour or prevent such a discussion? We do not have the space to discuss them here at length, but we will,
however, point to some of the possible difficulties. In the first place, there is the fact that, particularly in societies which claim to be completely
de-mythologized, political myths are most of the time intertwined with other kinds of discourses and tend thus to get lost behind them. One
only has to think of the often porous contours between mythical and historical narratives (Stråth, 2000) or
of the possible interplay between myth and scientific theory, as shown by the (neo-) Orientalist literature. Second, and
perhaps most importantly, is the fact that power tends to be concealed for the very reason that we have highlighted
above, namely that the more a power can be felt without being seen, the stronger it is. This, indeed, has been the
ambition of power in all times and in all places, but it is precisely in our epoch that this ambition has been given an
unprecedented chance. First, in the global village, it is the entire world that can become the potential site for the work on a political myth,
leaving thus potentially no blind spots. The
role that the media play as the site for the work on the myth of the
clash of civilizations is a powerful illustration of this potentiality. Second, the very mediatic configuration of such a village
enables political myth to reach levels of pervasiveness to which it could never have aspired in the past. Indeed, our life takes place in jungles of
potential icons of a political myth. Going
to the supermarket, surfing the Web, watching a film or a cartoon, or
even simply walking in the streets – all of them can be acts that expose us to the work on a political
myth. On the other hand, the more difficulties that arise for critical discussion, the more, it can be argued, we
have need of it.
A2: Cede the Political
Right wing fundamentalism and extremism in politics has permeated society – it
wages a war on those that disagrees with it – but now is key, we have the opportunity
to move on to a better form of democracy than we have right now
Giroux 11
Giroux, Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster
University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at
Ryerson University. "Breivik's Fundamentalist War on Politics, and Ours." Truthout. N.p., 3 Aug. 2011.
Web. 07 July 2015. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/2483:breiviks-fundamentalist-war-on-politicsand-ours
Such statistics point to policies that are not simply mean-spirited; they are cruel, sadistic and dishonor the government's obligations to young people and politically
marginalized populations. Economist Paul Krugman rightly claims that, "The G.O.P. budget plan isn't a good-faith effort to put America's fiscal house in order; it's
the American
government is being held hostage by a group of Republican extremists who purposely want to make
government dysfunctional. Far-right zealots such a Michele Bachmann and her conservative evangelical
compatriots embody a mode of fundamentalism that promotes gay-bashing, a disdain for social protections
and a deep hatred of government, which is rooted less in political and economic analyses than in biblical
stricture and religious values.[33] Yet, such commitments are not marginal to American politics. For example,
voodoo economics, with an extra dose of fantasy, and a large helping of mean-spiritedness."[32] Krugman goes further and argues that
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) stated that, "After years of discussions and months of negotiations, I have little question that as long as this
president is in the Oval Office, a real solution is unattainable."[34 ]
There is more than a covert racism at work here, given the
extremist views about Obama that inform much of the Republican Party, there is also a cult of certainty
that has given political extremism a degree of normalcy, while at the same time indicating the degree to
which such thought now permeates American society. In fact, absolutist thought is now driving official
state and federal policy and pushing an alleged liberal Obama to a far-right position, all in the name of a cowardly
appeal to bipartisanship and a deeply flawed notion of consensus. Not only is the power of market-driven casino capitalism at its zenith, but a culture of
fundamentalism has become the driving force in American politics that is only a few degrees away from
an outright embrace of a 21st century authoritarianism. What is interesting, and quite frightening, about Krugman's analysis of the
growing fundamentalism and religiosity of American politics is his insightful claim that such a move is being abetted by a dominant media apparatus that views
extremist ideas within what he calls a "cult of balance," in which such views are treated as just one more legitimate opinion. Listen to Brian Williams, the NBC News
anchor, on any given night, and you get firsthand one of the worst offenders of the cult of balance. Krugman is worth citing on this issue. He writes: News
reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of "centrist"
uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides. Some of us have long complained about the cult of
"balance," the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue,
never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read, "Views Differ on Shape of Planet." But
would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of
the ransom? The answer, it turns out, is yes. And this is no laughing matter :
The cult of balance has played an important role in
bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both
sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism.[35] All of which is to say that there is another side to rightwing fundamentalism that needs to be addressed outside of its xenophobic, homophobic,
antigovernment, antifeminist and youth-hating beliefs, which have become increasingly normalized,
legitimated and defined loosely as just another view in American society. Yet, this is about more than
the rise of a hate-filled fundamentalism and populist anti-intellectualism that scorns debate, dialogue
and critical exchange. It is also symptomatic of the end of politics, and, by default, signals the death knell of democracy itself. Politics becomes
moribund when dialogue, critical exchange, reasoned arguments, facts, logic and critical modes of
education become objects of derision and contempt. Right-wing extremism is nourished when the
formative culture that makes democracy possible is defunded, commercialized and diminished - when it
is eroded and increasingly ceases to exist. Right-wing extremism and the fundamentalist logic it
embraces is not merely a security threat; it does not simply produce terrorists. It actively wages a war on
the very possibility of judgment, informed argument and critical agency itself. It opens the door for lies
and omissions parading as truth, ignorance celebrated as informed reason and the dismissal of science
as just another worthy opinion. In the end, violence emerges as a legitimate strategy to weed out those not
on the side of an unquestioning moralism. Education redefined as training, fear driven by political
illiteracy and authoritarian populism parading as the will of the people speak to what philosopher Hannah Arendt once
called "dark times," to refer to that period in history in which the forces of totalitarianism and fascism
extinguished reason, thoughtful exchange, discerning judgments, justice and truth. We are once again in
on the brink of "dark times" and the clock is not merely ticking. The alarm is blaring, and yet the
American public refuses to wake from a nightmare that is about to become a dreadful and punishing
reality. Of course, history is open, and we have witnessed in Egypt, Iran, Syria, Greece and other countries,
men, women and young people who have refused the established and beckoning forms of
authoritarianism, giving rise to collective revolts that display immense courage and hope. It is past time
for Americans to look beyond existing forms of leadership, the tired vocabularies of established political
parties, the thoughtless stenography dispersed by mainstream media and the official view of democracy
as just another form of consumerism. It is time to look to those struggles abroad that both embrace
democracy and embody a form of civic courage in which thinking and morality inform each other in
support of a world where young people can flourish, politics becomes a noble practice and democracy
has a future.
A2: CP
DOJ
Justice Department police reforms fail; officials don’t follow them and the JD has to
return to problems that they tried to solve
Weichselbaum in 15
(Simone Weichselbaum; a staff writer and has spent more than a decade covering urban criminal justice
issues, “The Problems With Policing the Police”, Time.com, The Marshall Project 4/23/15, website,
7/10/15, http://time.com/police-shootings-justice-department-civil-rights-investigations/
the Justice Department announced it would again be scrutinizing the
conduct of a local police force – this time in North Charleston, S.C., where a white officer had shot and killed an unarmed black man,
No sooner had the video gone viral than
Walter Scott, as he tried to run away. Such announcements have become almost a national ritual in this moment of heightened sensitivity to
police conduct,
a ready federal response to the charges of bias and abuse that have risen against law
enforcement agencies across the country. From Albuquerque to Ferguson, the arrival of the department’s Civil Rights Division has
been meant to signal that Washington understands there is a problem and is committed to solving it. But as the Obama
administration has ratcheted up its oversight of state and local law-enforcement agencies, using a 21-year-old
law to impose reforms on police forces that show a pattern of civil rights violations, questions about the effectiveness of those
interventions have also been on the rise. In cities like Detroit and New Orleans, officials have railed at the high cost of the Justice
Department’s reform plans, including the multi-million-dollar fees paid to the monitors who make sure local officials comply with federal
mandates. Elsewhere, some local officials have simply refused to accept what they view as meddlesome dictates,
preferring to fight the demands for change in federal court. Then there is the challenge of making the policing reforms
last. Even where local leaders have embraced Washington’s prescriptions, Justice Department officials have
increasingly found themselves returning to grapple a second time with problems they thought they had
fixed.
A2: Courts – Congress Key
Strong Congressional action is key to prevent loopholes, ERPA is the best option
Singh in 2014 (Rajdeep is director of law and policy at the Sikh Coalition, the largest Sikh American civil rights
organization in the United States; “We need strong law, not weak guidance, on racial profiling” Published:
December 13, 2014, 10:00 am Accessed: 7/10/15; http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/civil-rights/227002-weneed-strong-law-not-weak-guidance-on-racial-profiling)
In Washington, policymakers often exaggerate the importance of non-achievements. A case in point is the
Justice Department’s new
guidance on the use of race and other suspect classifications in federal law enforcement activities.
Although the new guidance explicitly recognizes that discriminatory profiling is “unfair” and “ineffective,” and
that biased practices “promote mistrust of law enforcement, and perpetuate negative and harmful
stereotypes” – it exempts key components of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including border and
airport screening, and does not even apply to state and local law enforcement. To put these gaping
loopholes into perspective, DHS is the largest federal law enforcement agency, and state and local law
enforcement carry out the bulk of law enforcement activities in the United States. Back in 2001, President George W.
Bush resolved to end racial profiling in the United States. Although law enforcement officials throughout the world overwhelmingly consider
racial stereotypes to be an ineffective basis for law enforcement activity, the Bush Administration framed the issue in moral terms, expressing
the view that profiling is “wrong” and “dehumanizing.” Despite this lofty rhetoric, the guidance issued by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft
two years after 9/11 was riddled with loopholes that gave federal law enforcement agencies a blank check to profile with impunity The Ashcroft
guidance did not even pretend to protect Americans from profiling based on religion and nationality, and gave federal law enforcement
agencies wide latitude to trump civil rights by invoking national security and border protection. These loose standards remained in force long
after the inauguration of President Obama and may have led to widespread civil rights abuses against law-abiding Americans, including profiling
of Americans suspected of being illegal immigrants; interrogation of Muslim Americans at border checkpoints, and profiling of ethnic and
religious minorities by the TSA at American airports. Although Attorney General Eric Holder’s new guidance does belatedly add religion and
nationality to the list of characteristics that deserve protection from profiling, this may be a moot point. The non-inclusion of border and airport
screening in the guidance means that Americans could still be asked to produce immigration papers if they look too dark; Muslims and Arabs
returning to the United States could still be asked where and how often they pray; and minorities could still be asked to submit to extra
screening at airport checkpoints because of stereotypes about what Americans should look like. In substance, if not form, the Holder guidance
may be just as bad as the Ashcroft guidance. While the Obama Administration dithered for five years about how to improve the Ashcroft
guidance, dozens of
lawmakers in Congress co-sponsored the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA). Unlike the guidance,
this important legislation promises a categorical prohibition on invidious profiling throughout the
nation, without any loopholes. To promote accountability among law enforcement agencies nationwide,
ERPA would provide a meaningful remedy to profiling victims and require data collection to diagnose
the extent to which profiling is occurring. Although ERPA has languished like most legislation in Congress, it is one of the best
available blueprints for Americans who agree it is wrong for law-abiding individuals to be treated like criminals by their government solely
because of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and nationality. Given the inadequacy of the Holder guidance, the next Congress should
demonstrate leadership and pass ERPA. This need not be a partisan issue. Liberals and conservatives alike have a stake in ensuring that lawabiding Americans remain free from government scrutiny. Nor does this issue have to be one that only concerns people of color. Profiling can
affect anyone. For example, although it is true that the U.S. Department of Justice has reconstituted a task force to address the sharp rise in
domestic extremism, it should be illegal to subject white Americans to extra security screening simply because they fit the racial profile of
Timothy McVeigh. Beyond Congress, state and local government officials must begin to close their own gaps by using ERPA – not the new
Holder guidance – as a baseline for their own anti-profiling laws and policies. Given the Obama Administration’s failure to address profiling
through its new guidance, there is much more work to be done to end profiling in America. Attorney General Eric Holder has repeatedly said
that profiling undermines the effectiveness of law enforcement, and so it is unfortunate that his legacy will be that he could not end the
practice – in his words, “once and for all.”
A2: Courts – Social Change
Litigation prevents change- counterproductive, privileges the elite, and leads to
fractious brand of politics
BAGENSTOS, 2015 Social Change Litigation as Just Another Political Tool R. "Social Change Litigation
as Just Another Political Tool." The New Rambler. Oxford University Press, 2015. Web. 12 July 2015.
Every fall, law school lecture halls fill with idealistic young students who dream of bringing lawsuits that change the world, in the mode of
Thurgood Marshall or (pre-2000) Ralph Nader. When they take their seats, though, those students often hear that their idealism is misplaced.
The notion that litigation can promote social change is at best a “Hollow Hope,” as the title to Gerald Rosenberg’s
influential book tells us. At
and right, that efforts
worst, litigation may be counterproductive and pernicious. Students hear, from left, center,
to achieve social change through litigation will provoke a backlash that will ultimately
undermine those efforts; that litigation is undemocratic and privileges the elite voices of lawyers and
judges; that litigation promotes a discourse of individualism that gives short shrift to the interests of the
community and ultimately depoliticizes; and that the party-on-party nature of litigation is a poor fit for
complex, “polycentric” social problems. One might regard it as a tribute to the indomitable human spirit that some new law
school graduates, after three years of so much cold water thrown on their idealistic dreams, still plan on filing suits that make social change.
The critics of using litigation for social change make cogent points with substantial empirical support. But their arguments have, it seems to me,
foundered on one key question: Compared to what? Major social changes, achieved through litigation, have provoked backlashes, but so too
have major social changes achieved through legislation. The reaction to the Affordable Care Act stands as only the most recent, prominent
example. Litigation privileges elite voices, but it’s not like our legislative system is a model of openness and mass democracy. And legislation,
just like litigation, can focus too narrowly on particularly salient dimensions of complex problems and therefore reach suboptimal outcomes. To
decide whether achieving social change through litigation is pernicious, or at best a hollow hope, we must compare it to other modes of
achieving social change. In their smart new book, How Policy Shapes Politics, political scientists Jeb Barnes and Thomas Burke focus resolutely
on that compared-to-what question. Through a series of case studies involving injury-compensation policy, they seek to identify whether
policies driven by litigation (or, in their preferred term, “adversarial legalism”) have different effects on subsequent politics than policies
implemented through a centralized bureaucracy (“bureaucratic legalism”). Although the case-study method limits our ability to draw systematic
conclusions from their analysis, Barnes and Burke more than make up for that limitation by offering a rich account of the development of policy
in the area of injury compensation. They recognize that no American policy is an ideal type—litigation matters at least around the edges of even
the most centralized, bureaucratic program, and even the most litigation-oriented policies involve some degree of expert or bureaucratic
administration. But their three cases—compensation for work disability, asbestos injuries, and vaccine injuries—lie at identifiably distinct points
on the spectrum between adversarial and bureaucratic legalism. We compensate work disability through the Social Security system, which is
about as close to the ideal type of bureaucratic legalism as we get in the United States. Asbestos injuries have been compensated through the
tort system—the paradigm of adversarial legalism. Although the important role played by bankruptcy courts in the asbestos area has added
some degree of bureaucracy, Congress has rejected efforts to adopt a more centralized, bureaucratic compensation scheme. Vaccine-injury
compensation started off, like asbestos, in adversarial tort suits against manufacturers. But Congress ultimately passed a law, the National
Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which largely moved these cases out of the tort system and into one administered by the federal
government and funded by tax revenues. Comparing these three approaches to injury-compensation policy, Barnes and Burke find unproven a
number of the charges leveled against litigation as a tool to achieve social change. They reject the claim, articulated by Rosenberg and William
Forbath among others, that litigation crowds out other forms of political mobilization. Rather, they find that in their case studies “adversarial
legalism seemed to fuel group mobilization, creating a more fragmented, pluralistic politics featuring more diverse interests with competing
viewpoints” (p.17). Activists did not wholly commit to litigation or other forms of mobilization but instead “seemed adept at moving from one
institution to another, looking for levers wherever they could find them” (p. 17). The shift in the vaccine area from tort law to a bureaucratic
compensation system—a shift supported by many of those who had brought suits claiming vaccine injuries—is a prime example of the point (p.
162-167). Barnes and Burke also reject the claim that the court system’s reliance on precedent makes litigation a poor tool for dealing with
problems that change over time. There is a status quo bias in both adversarial and bureaucratic programs, which makes basically any program
hard to change at the macro-level once it is implemented. But Barnes and Burke find that “bureaucratic programs and agencies often proved
less flexible than legal doctrines and courts, failing to adjust existing rules to new policy circumstances and political demands, and forcing
stakeholders to turn to the courts, which proved remarkably adept at adjusting administrative regulations and legal doctrines to new
circumstances” (p. 20). Flexibility and responsiveness to change over time has long been understood as one of the benefits of the common-law
method, and both the asbestos and vaccine cases offer a number of examples of this sort of judicial flexibility. As for backlash, Barnes and
Burke find that litigation did often lead to “counter-mobilization,” but that it “was far more complex and variegated than is implied by the
backlash literature” (p. 21). Sometimes, as in the case of vaccine compensation, counter-mobilization can scramble the existing politics, creating
opportunities for talented policy entrepreneurs (in this case Rep. Henry Waxman) to build unusual coalitions to make enduring change through
legislation. In all of these respects, Barnes and Burke find, litigation is not a way out of ordinary politics so much as it is a tool that individuals
and groups seeking social change can employ in those politics. It is a tool that may have different costs and benefits—litigation may privilege
the voices of lawyers, but it may also provide an entrée into pluralistic bargaining for previously excluded groups—but it is ultimately just one
of many tools. Barnes and Burke’s conclusions thus resonate strongly with Stuart Scheingold’s argument, in his 1984 book The Politics of Rights,
that legal rights are best understood as political resources that can be deployed by social movements. Although there are limits to the
conclusions that can be drawn from three case studies in one broad area of policy, idealistic young law students should at least find some
solace in Barnes and Burke’s discussion. But Barnes
and Burke conclude that their case studies vindicate one of the
charges against litigation as a tool for social change — that it individualizes political interests,
undermines social solidarity, and ultimately creates “a fractious brand of politics” (p. 23). Asbestos and
vaccine litigation, they find, made it harder to reach a political consensus because the litigation process
“encouraged Congress and interest groups to see the problems in terms of individual fault — the
problem of a particular company — as opposed to a more systemic policy issue” (p. 194). Moreover,
litigation created a “complex pattern of winners and losers,” which led to “a fractious, chaotic politics”
(pp. 194-195). By contrast, although Social Security Disability Insurance engendered contentious arguments at the moment of its creation, the
politics of the program ultimately “settled down,” as opposition to the program became narrow and muted, while beneficiaries “remained
united against proposed cuts” (pp. 194-195).
Litigation fails at social change- may enforce upon the state a greater obligation of
responsiveness, but not greater ethical inclusiveness
Barzilai, 2005 Gad. "The Evasive Facets of Law: Litigation as Collective Action." Adalah’s Newsletter
(Feb. 2005): 1-3. Washington University, Feb. 2005. Web. 12 July 2015.
A myth still prevails among critics and advocates of litigation alike, that litigation is a significant part of
popular practical culture. The critics would like to suggest that litigation is unreservedly overused in democracies, while its adherents
underscore its practical and, even more so, potential usefulness. However, even when
numbers, and their influence in society increases accordingly, the
NGOs which employ litigation increase in
accessibility to litigation remains limited socially. Thus,
most Arab-Palestinian NGOs in Israel are not litigious, and most social grievances cannot reach lawyers at all (Barzilai 2003). In most countries
around the globe, litigation is carried out primarily by the "haves," the bourgeoisie, like the financial corporations, and not by the "haves-nots,"
the needy, the proletariat. Since litigation is costly and luxurious in comparison with some other modes of political participation, most
individuals cannot afford it. Litigation is an elite means of sociopolitical struggle and not independent from social class interests. Communal
litigation, for example, requires strong organizational mechanisms and financial resources. Visibly, it does not mean that litigation may not be
constructive to the politics of rights, through assisting the expansion of rights’ discourse and rights' mobilization. Yet, to argue that litigation
may be a foremost tool in resolving social conflicts is also to presume, often wrongly, that litigation is affordable for those who desperately
need it. Such criticism as it stands does not confute all the virtues of litigation, but it does require us to critically limit the prevailing sense of
celebration, constructed through the mass media, politicians, and interested lawyers (Haltom and McCann 2004). Even when
and
where litigation is utilized by communities, groups, social movements, and organizations, however,
there is a threshold of professional language, which constitutes a significant pillar of the judicial
architecture. Myriad social and political problems cannot be converted into legalistic language, and, if
they are translated, their articulation is meaningfully different from the sociopolitical language used to
denote the same sociopolitical problem in praxis. Frequently, subdued national feelings and poverty are not litigious, as such.
A lawyer knows that s/he needs to name these foundational issues through various rhetorical and legalistic constructions, relying upon
segments of rights and duties, obligations and rules of evidence, which constitute a different type of a problem, one which may be resolvable in
the courtroom, but which often does not do justice to the victim of any given sociopolitical predicament. The threshold of language and
professionalism inflicts a high cost of conversion from the sociopolitical praxis to the imagined reality in the courtroom. Once a sociopolitical
problem has been signified in legal phraseology its denotation confines the scope of the perceived sociopolitical problem. Litigation may assist
Israeli Arab-Palestinians in attaining more equality in allocations of national budgets for education, which in itself is no minuscule achievement.
However, it cannot make the education rendered by the Jewish state for Arab-Palestinians much better. Litigation may enforce
upon
the state a greater obligation of responsiveness, but not greater ethical inclusiveness (Jabareen 2004). The
epistemological, ideological, economic, and sociopolitical costs of naming sociopolitical problems in legal terms are not marginal, and they have
certainly to be taken into somber account during the legal, sociopolitical calculus of minority members. Furthermore, even
if a legal
remedy is granted, either through court or out-of-court settlements, it does not necessarily serve the
purposes of the litigation itself. We have sufficient data in law and society research to know that often the legal remedies granted
after protracted and costly processes of litigation are too general or too unenforceable on an averse or even hostile administration (Rosenberg
1991). Last and not least among some of the thresholds that I explicate in this article is that litigation should be understood in its deliberative
democratic context. The
efforts of minority members who struggle to litigate cases may meanwhile divert all
public attention from profound discussions of critical issues to disputes around the litigation itself.
Hence, litigation as a policy may inflict damage on our abilities to develop a deliberative democracy. I
move on to the next section to analyze another difficulty with litigation, before exploring some of its advantages.
Law prevents social change- coercion, assumptions about human behaviors and others
Fox in 1991 Dennis R. Fox, “Law Against Social Change” Paper presented at the annual convention of
the American Psychological Association, San Francisco 1991
The first way that law presents social change is obvious: Coercion. As Lawrence Friedman put it, Law has its hidden
persuaders--its moral basis, its legitimacy--but in the last analysis it has force, too, to back it up. Law carries a powerful stick: the threat of force.
This is the fist inside its velvet glove. Law
is used directly and indirectly to hinder both legal and illegal social change
efforts. Electoral challenges, for example, are deflected by state legislatures, which devise unreasonable deadlines,
excessive petition requirements, and other hassles to keep third parties off the ballot. As an old anarchist slogan put it, if voting could change
the system, it would be illegal. Activists
fare little better in court. Given litigation delays, costs, procedural
pitfalls, and judges' backgrounds, radicals are rarely successful. The doctrines of standing, governmental immunity, and
political questions, the substance of conservative legal principles, and the likelihood of reversal upon appeal limit how much even a
sympathetic judge can allow activists to win. Since law is created by the powerful rather than the weak, dissident concerns are often simply
dismissed as frivolous. When activists demonstrate peacefully, they often find the law against them. Although it is no longer legitimate to arrest
those who advocate change, the benign view of our "First Amendment freedoms" has a fairly short history, and has never been as absolute as
many think. In the wake of the Persian Gulf War, and remembering the recent treatment given flag burners, any confidence that the public
supports truly free speech is unwarranted. Surveillance, infliltration, and repression of legal activist groups continue. Harassment of activists
doesn't come just from government. Corporations often file libel and other lawsuits against people who use letters to newspapers, public
statements, and similar methods to criticize corporate projects such as toxic waste dumps. More than 1000 of these "Strategic Lawsuits Against
Public Participation" have been filed within the past decade. Although most of these suits are legally "unsuccessful" in that free speech rights
are upheld and the activist pays no damages, the suits serve their purposes of transforming political debates into private disputes and, more
significantly, tieing up activist's time and resources, bankrupting the activist, often causing the abandonment of public advocacy. When
activists move on to direct action and civil disobedience, law's coercive force is clearest. Police infiltration and
instigation of violent activities, selective prosecution, and preventive detention add to the likelihood of guilty verdicts and disproportionate
sentences. Judges
usually prevent defendants from presenting a necessity defense based on their
motivations for breaking the law. When the jury is told the incident is a "simple trespassing case," for
example, rather than a political act, the primary concern of the activist is dismissed as irrelevant. Similarly,
judges in most states do not tell juries about jury nullification, which allows jurors to acquit despite the evidence. The result in both cases is that
activists are likely to be convicted even if the jury is sympathetic. In response to legal coercion, psychologists have helped defend political
defendants, and this help should be expanded. Despite the value of these efforts, though, their limitations should be kept in mind. Tools
devised for radical purposes cannot be restricted to those ends; any useful methods will be adopted by more powerful forces. For example,
scientific jury selection, developed to help the Harrisburg Seven defend themselves against Vietnam-era conspiracy charges, is mostly used
today not by activists but by large corporations paying high fees to Litigation Sciences and similar companies. The
second way law
opposes social change is through its assumptions about human behavior. Psychologists seek to identify these,
but more attention should be paid to two underlying assumptions discussed by June Tapp. "The myth of humankind's inherent lawlessness,"
according to Tapp, ignores the fact that "the search for rules and rule dependency appears early in human life and is visible across all activity
from games to government and language to law." "In essence," she added, "no community is truly lawless," and adherence to the myth
perpetuates a law-and-order mentality. The flip side of the lawlessness myth is the legality myth. As Tapp noted, The
crippling aspect of
the legality myth is the assumption that legality and its correlates of justice, obligation, and
responsibility reside only in the law. . . . If [this] continues . . . then the emergence of an authoritarian
repressive law is more likely. Both myths, I suggest, lead us to see calls for social change as dangerous
rather than liberating. The third way law inhibits social change is through the central myth that the law
is "legitimate," that obedience to law is appropriate because legal authorities have the right to make demands. This belief,
according to Friedman, "prevents anarchy and induces people to obey orders and commands without the use of force." Legitimacy is
necessary for the political system to continue in its current form, since (as Haney put it) "in a very real
sense, the 'consent of the governed' depends upon such fictions," including the fiction that law is sacred (McBride).
Psycholegal scholars who assume law's legitimacy should consider the degree to which their own views are shaped by the legitimacy ideology.
Isaac Prilleltensky recently noted that "At best, [psychology's conforming message] may be preventing changes that could enhance the wellbeing of the population. At worst, it may be silently endorsing unjust social practices," reinforcing dominant values through so-called value-free
scientific statements that provide an asocial image of the human being . . . essentially independent from sociohistorical circumstances. [This
leads people] to underestimate the impact of adverse social conditions on their lives, thereby reducing the likelihood of engaging in activities in
defiance of the status quo. The
fourth way law opposes social change is in blunting appeals for substantive
justice by focusing instead on procedural justice. As Tom Tyler noted, research such as his on procedural justice poses a
potential danger when it identifies the degree to which legal procedures are seen as satisfying or fair, because "Government leaders
may find it easier to create conditions of 'perceived fairness' than to solve problems or provide needed
benefits." Although Tyler minimized the possibility of this false consciousness, Haney saw this as the Supreme Court's "let
them eat due process approach." Rather than remaining neutral and dispassionate, exposing false
consciousness should be one of our central concerns. The fifth way law stands against social change is
the insistence that "the rule of law" is superior to nonlaw, that the United States is a "government of
law, not of men." Related to the lawlessness and legality myths is the assumption that problems should be resolved through law--seen as
objective, rational, and hardnosed--rather than through nonlegal means--seen as subjective, ruthless, and unpredictable. Law is better, it
is said, even if the application of general principle to a particular case brings an unfair result, because
the only alternative to law is chaos. The opposite of legal technicality, however, is not chaos, but equity. Under equity principles,
legal technicalities can be set aside to prevent injustice. As might be expected, although equity's use as a discretionary corrective is accepted in
theory in most legal systems, in practice judges often dismiss it precisely because equity implies that the law is inadequate. Consequently,
equity has been limited to narrow areas of law and to relatively ineffective remedies. As already noted, judges resist application of equity-like
doctrines such as jury nullification and the necessity defense. The
final way law opposes social change has to do with the
self-defeating character of legal solutions, despite their seductive appeal. There are three points I want to make. First,
reform is seductive because it assumes that law can be transformed so significantly that it will operate
at a "higher principled level," as Tapp put it. This is doubtful, though, because the reasons for which law exists conflict with
principled levels of reasoning and ethics. Law exists to maintain rather than change the status quo, to protect some at the expense of others, to
control rather than liberate. Second,
reform efforts may succeed, but at the cost of unpredicted "side-effects"
that complicate other problems or lead to long-term failure. A systems perspective must acknowledge that social
problems are interconnected rather than isolated. Third, and most important, the very success of legal solutions
makes things worse, because legal solutions reduce people's ability and motivation to work together
with others on community solutions to social problems. Legal reforms may work, but only by forcing
complex human interactions into an artificial framework, creating dependency on legal authorities. Black
noted that "in theory, law makes trustworthiness unnecessary, even obsolete. When law is fully in command, morality itself loses relevance.
Right and wrong become a specialty of professionals such as lawyers, police, and judges." McBride argued that law "has an alienating or even a
repressive effect . . . , especially on those who occupy subordinate social roles." And Lerner pointed out that law teaches us that we are not
capable of being good unless we are forced to be good.
The Courts cannot spur societal change- it is subject to the whims of the majority
Berenji , 2008 The US Supreme Court : A "Follower, not a Leader" of Social Change. Berenji, Shahin BA
(PoliSci). Lethbridge Undergraduate Research Journal. Volume 3 Number 1. 2008.
In the United States, the Supreme Court is the highest appellate court or legal institution that can define or interpret the rule of law. According
to associate justice Felix Frankfurter, 1 “the Court breathes life, feeble or strong, into the inert pages of the Constitution and the statute books”
(Dahl 280). Yet, to consider the Court strictly as a legal institution is to underestimate its significance since the Court must also decide on
controversial matters of national policy. In this sense, the Court is a “political institution” that must solve societal disagreements that cannot be
“found in or deduced from precedent, statute, and Constitution” (Dahl 281). Nevertheless, although
it issues decisions on
controversial and divisive matters, the Supreme Court cannot be said to catalyze social change for it
utilizes societal and governmental opinion as the medium to interpret, apply, and implement public
policy, thus “following, not leading” the United States. Because of its inability to initiate decisions, the
Supreme Court has implemented landmark policies usually based upon societal legal challenges. In the
Court case Marbury vs. Madison (1803), Chief Justice John Marshall established what would commonly be known as the power of judicial
review, enabling the Court to be the final interpreter of the National Constitution. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the Supreme Court
cannot use judicial review unless it receives a court or “test” case from society. And so, even in the face of blatant constitutional violations, the
Court would be incapable of exercising judicial review. In essence,
challenges to social policy come not from the Supreme
Court but from the individuals that file suit or complaints about constitutional violations. The fact that the
Court reacts only to societal claims is testament to the Court's limited authority in dealing with social policy. In the historic case of Gideon vs.
Wainright (1963), the Supreme Court ruled, through judicial review, that “indigent defendants” charged with a felony were entitled to the
services of a lawyer (paid for by the government) as indicated in the Sixth Amendment. 2 This Court decision was unique in that it extended the
sixth amendment “right to counsel” to all state criminal proceedings. Although the Supreme Court expanded the meaning of the right to
counsel, the fact that Gideon's case was needed to expand the sixth amendment right represents the procedural limitations of judicial review.
Thus, as the Gideon Case evinces, societal discontent has been used as the starting point to adjust or to initiate social change within the United
States. Similar
to its dependency upon the “test case,” the Supreme Court also needs societal support to
implement and enforce its Court precedents. Although it issues decisions, the Supreme Court cannot directly implement them,
which severely constrains their impact upon society. Unlike the executive or the legislative branches of government,
the Supreme Court cannot appropriate money to ensure the application of its policies. In addition, the
Supreme Court cannot use the police or other law-enforcing entities to execute its decisions. As a result,
the Supreme Court must rely on societal support, particularly the federal government, to ensure the
implementation of its decisions. According to Alexander Hamilton, “[the Supreme Court] may truly be said to have neither force nor
will, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments” (Rosenberg
15). This
dependency truly limits the power of the Court by making it difficult for the judicial institution to
oppose the policies of society. In 1830, for instance, at President Andrew Jackson's urgency, Congress passed the Indian Removal
Act, which allowed the relocation of most tribes in the eastern United States to reservations west of the Mississippi River. Following the
impetus from this act, Georgia passed a series of state laws which enabled white settlers to seize Cherokee territory in the northwestern
frontier of that state. The Cherokee Nation, however, made the claim that they were a sovereign political entity within the boundaries of
Georgia. In the 1832 case of Worcester vs. Georgia, the Supreme Court sided with the Cherokee Indians, ruling that Georgia superceded federal
jurisdiction over the Cherokee Nation. This decision marked the first time that the Court actively sought to protect a minority group from the
ruling majority. Moreover, this decision declared that the actions of Georgia as well as those actions that were permissible under the 1830
Indian Removal Act were illegitimate and unconstitutional. Lacking
either government or popular support, however, the
Court's decision was not enforced, demonstrating the Court's inability to stymie change without
majority consensus. As President Andrew Jackson jokingly stated, “Chief Justice John Marshall has made his decision…now let him
enforce it…” (Burner 310). Consequently, without the protection of the Supreme Court's decision, the Indian population, including the
Cherokees, Chickasaw, and Choctaw, were forced to migrate westward along the “trail of tears” by federal and/or state governments (Burner
310). This mass exodus of Indians caused an estimated ten thousand deaths which caused some to rename the “the trail of tears” (as it had
been called), “the trail of death” (Burner 311). This
example truly illustrates the Supreme Court's incapability of
implementing decisions without societal support. More importantly, it shows how “words are not
action,” meaning that force is necessary for the implementation of Court precedents (Rosenberg 18). The
blatant demonstration of the Court's inability to forcefully implement change set up a judicial trend to support the tendencies of the majority.
According to Robert Dahl, the Court adopted the position of keeping their decisions in line “with the policy views dominant among the
lawmaking majorities 3 [Congress and the President]... “ (285). Thus, the decision-making powers of the Supreme Court evolved “to confer
legitimacy on the fundamental policies of the successful coalition” (Dahl 294). Therefore, from
Worcester vs. Georgia, the
Supreme Court learned to coordinate its decisions in line with national opinion. As significant issues of
social reform generally trigger opposition, the Court learned to align itself with the majority to facilitate
the implementation and enforcement of its policies. Moreover, alignment with the majority inadvertently helped confer
strength, respect, and legitimacy to the Supreme Court. According to Robert Dahl, “this legitimacy the Court jeopardizes if it flagrantly opposes
the major policies of the dominant alliance” (293). However, since the Worcester vs. Georgia case, “such a course of action has been one in
which the Court will not normally be tempted to engage” (Dahl 293). For instance, since 1935, seventy-five percent of the Court's decisions
have been in support of the majority, indicative of the Court's passivity at opposing society (Rosenberg 13). More recently, sixty-five percent of
the Court's decisions have been well supported by the majority of people within the United States, indicative of just how the Court's decisions
have been decided in favor of popular or majority opinion (2000 Gallup Poll). In this way, then, the Court's decisions have become relatively
predictable, unimportant, and insignificant since its precedents merely reinforce the ideas or opinions that are already prevalent within society.
In addition, because the Court's decisions typically reflect the opinions of either the lawmaking or the national majority, it fails to challenge the
beliefs or the principles of society. And so, the Court's inability to adjudicate decisions in opposition to the majority prevents it from protecting
the rights of minorities and from becoming a true proponent of social change. While many people believe the Court's progressive decisions on
civil right issues have been a general exception to this common pattern, those decisions were also fomented by national opinion. Because of
national opinion, the Supreme Court ultimately established civil right precedents to support the de-segregation movement. In Brown vs. Board
of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), the Court unanimously ruled that the “separate but equal” doctrine established by Plessy vs. Ferguson
(1896) was unconstitutional since “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (Rosenberg 39). According to the Court, “stateenforced segregation on the basis of color deprives individuals (particularly school children) of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by
the fourteenth amendment...” (Rosenberg 39). More importantly, the Brown case established the precedent that permitted the gradual desegregation of all public places, including parks, recreational facilities, courtrooms, restrooms, and buses. This was a paradigmatic event in that
it represented the Courts' ability to produce social change, particularly in protecting an oppressed minority from the actions of a majority. The
fact that the Court protected a minority group, African-Americans, made the Court appear as the “shield and buckler” of all minorities (Dahl
284). Nevertheless, such a significant change was motivated by the growing discontent with racism and inequality within American society. In
1946, President Truman established the President's Committee on Civil Rights to study discrimination and its effects in the United States. This
committee was important in that it symbolized the government's concern for the issue of racial discrimination. Moreover, in 1948, President
Truman had prohibited federal job discrimination and had de-segregated the US armed forces. Thus, even before the Brown decision, the
government was addressing the issue of civil rights on a large scale, going so far as to de-segregate the armed forces. Furthermore, the fact that
society re-elected Truman (in 1948), a proponent of civil rights legislation, indirectly demonstrated a certain degree of national support for the
civil rights movement. The issue of civil rights was such a pressing concern that it forced the conservative Republican Party to adopt a moderate
civil rights platform in later elections. Although many states in the south were vehemently opposed to the civil rights movement, most of the
other states in the union vastly approved the government's course of action. In other words, a majority of people in the United States
concurred with the plan “to eradicate all racial discrimination” (Burner 890). As is evident, then, the Brown case did not profoundly “affect
national thinking” since there was already a growing sentiment for equality and de-segregation. Therefore, the Supreme Court merely
reinforced the de-segregation ideologies already held within government and society, once again following, not initiating, the route to social
change. In
conclusion, the Court is a somewhat constrained institution in that it only responds to the
demands and whims of society. The Court's dependency upon society for case initiation as well as case
enforcement prevents the Court from rendering decisions entirely opposed to societal opinion, thus why
the Court can never fully lead social change within the United States. This is why, “at its best the Court operates to
confer legitimacy, not simply on the particular and parochial policies of the dominant alliance, but upon the basic patterns of behavior required
for the operation of a democracy”
The Supreme Court historic role has been to block social change
Blake in 15
(John Blake; writes about race, religion, politics and other assorted topics, “Supreme Court a force for
change? Not so fast” CNN.com, 6/27/15, website, 7/12/15,
http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/21/us/supreme-court-change/)
(CNN)He was a poor, frail teenager who would have melted away into history, but Reuben Dagenhart became the central character in one of
the U.S. Supreme Court's most notorious cases. He worked 60 hours a week in a North Carolina textile mill, earning 10 cents a day. The work
scarred his lungs and stunted his growth. It was 1916, and Dagenhart was just one of millions of child laborers who worked in dangerous mines,
dank sweatshops and textile mills in early 20th-century America. The U.S. Congress
had just passed a law banning child
labor after a national movement was launched to stop the practice. Southern cotton manufactures, though, recruited
Dagenhart's father to file a lawsuit claiming the new law unjustly deprived him of his son's wages. The Supreme Court heard
the case and ruled in 1918 that the law was "repugnant to the Constitution" because it violated states' rights and
exceeded Congress' power to regulate commerce. Dagenhart returned to the textile mills, as did millions of other American
children whose lives were damaged by the ruling. The Dagenhart decision offers a lesson about the Supreme Court not found in many civics
textbooks, some legal scholars and observers say: The
court's historical role has been to block political and social
change, not validate it. "It took an extra 20 years to do away with child labor," says Garrett Epps, a constitutional
law professor at the University Of Baltimore School Of Law and a contributing editor for The Atlantic. "That's 20 years of children coughing their
lungs out in textile mills or dragging wagons of coals underground instead of going to school because the court chose to distort the Constitution
that way." The
Supreme Court made headlines this week in two cases that profoundly affect the lives of
millions of Americans: It ruled 5-4 that same-sex marriage is legal nationwide and voted 6-3 to uphold health
care subsidies for millions enrolled in Obamacare. The decisions are part of a ritual every June: As the high court ends its session, the
media hypes the most controversial cases, legal pundits make their predictions and commentators explain how each decision will change the
country.
But is the Supreme Court's mission really about change -- or making sure change never happens
in the first place? Forget any notion of looking to the Supreme Court for boldness, say Epps and others. The
court has defended the status quo throughout much of its history, usually ruling in favor of "wealth,
power and privilege." "The dominant historical role for the court for all but a very brief period has been
to be a conservative force," says Epps, author of "Wrong and Dangerous: Ten Right-Wing Myths about Our Constitution." Not so fast,
say other court observers. What about all the welfare programs and regulatory agencies the court has left standing? Besides, if the court is slow
to make change, that's because the Constitution itself is a conservative document, they say. The court eventually comes around, changing with
one of the Supreme Court's most revered rulings to make their
Brown v. Board of Education. The court's 1954 decision ordered public schools to end state-sponsored segregation at a time
when much of America accepted racial segregation. Critics see it as evidence of the court's inability to enforce its
decisions. But defenders see something else: "Was the Supreme Court perfect on this issue?" asks Clark Neily, an attorney with the
the times just as the American people do. Both sides cite
point:
libertarian public interest law firm Institute for Justice and author of "Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution's
Promise of Limited Government." "Of course not. But was it better than the other branches of government and society in general? I would say
so."
A2: Courts - enforcement
Judges rarely cause change, and when they do, they have no power to enforce its
decisions
Blake in 15
(John Blake; writes about race, religion, politics and other assorted topics, “Supreme Court a force for
change? Not so fast” CNN.com, 6/27/15, website, 7/12/15,
http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/21/us/supreme-court-change/)
The court has been an enemy of change because the Constitution is hostile to change as well, others say.
Gerald Rosenberg, a University of Chicago law professor, says the Constitution is a conservative document that protects private control over
the allocation of resources. It doesn't provide for basic rights such as education and health care.
Progressive movements that
sought social change often couldn't point to a specific constitutional passage that affirmed their goals. "If
you're on the left and you are trying to find a right, typically the Constitution doesn't state it," says
Rosenberg, author of "The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change?" "You have to argue by implication. You are always
working with a document that wasn't designed to further or protect your interests." Leaders of progressive
moments often have avoided going to the Supreme Court because of its limitations, Rosenberg says. They
knew that social and political change came primarily from movements that pressured politicians into
passing laws, Rosenberg wrote in a 2005 University of Chicago law journal article titled "Courting Disaster: Looking for Change in All the
Wrong Places." "They understood that judges, and the courts in which they served, were dedicated to
preserving the status quo and unequal distributions of power, wealth and privilege," Rosenberg wrote.
People also should be wary of looking to the court for change because even in those rare moments
when it tries to create change, it fails because it has no power to enforce its decisions, he says. Look at
Brown v. Board of Education, he says. Southern school districts ignored the decision for years. What forced them to abandon state-sanctioned
segregation wasn't the high court's edict -- it was two laws, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965,
he says. The 1964 Civil Right Act declared that no "program or activity" that discriminated could receive federal financial assistance. And the
1965 law sent federal money to support education in the poorest states, many of which were in the South. The federal government told
Southern school districts that if they didn't desegregate, they wouldn't receive federal money, Rosenberg says. "Now the courts could step in
and take the money away," Rosenberg says. "That's what did it.
The Supreme Court can’t enact changes without Congress- empirics prove
Rosenberg in 5
(Gerald Rosenberg; Associate Professor of Political Science and Lecturer in Law, University of Chicago,
“Courting Disaster: Looking for Changes in All the Wrong Places” uchicago.edu, 54 Drake Law Review
795 2005, database, 7/12/15,
http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2922&context=journal_articles)
Brown v. Board of Education may be the most well-known and widely celebrated case in Supreme Court
history. 88 In declaring that racial segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, the Court repudiated its prior, pro-segregation
approach to the Constitution. This was clearly for the good but the question for Progressives is whether Brown made a
difference in ending race-based segregation in public schools in particular, and racial discrimination more broadly. The
answer is no. On the most straight-forward level, public schools remained segregated after Brown. A decade after
Brown virtually nothing had changed for African-American students living in the eleven states of the former Confederacy that required racebased school segregation by law. For example,
in the 1963-1964 school year, barely one in one hundred (1.2%) of these
African-American children was educated in a non- segregated school. 8 9 That means that for nearly ninety-nine of
every one hundred African-American children in the South a decade after Brown, the finding of a constitutional right changed nothing. 9 0
Change did come to the South, but that occurred only after the Congress acted-providing monetary incentives for
desegregation and threatening to cut off federal funds if segregation was maintained. 9 1 More subtly, there is little or no evidence
that supports the claims that Brown gave civil rights salience, pressed political elites to act, pricked the consciences of whites,
legitimated the grievances of blacks, or inspired the activists of the civil rights movement. What Brown did do was
energize civil rights opponents and channel resources away from building the civil rights movement. 9 2 In the wake of
Brown, resistance to ending segregation increased in all areas, not merely in education but also in voting, transportation,
and the use of public places. Brown "unleashed a wave of racism that reached hysterical proportions." 9 3 By stiffening resistance to civil rights
and raising fears before the activist phase of the civil rights movement was in place, Brown may actually have delayed the achievement of civil
rights. Litigation may also have delayed the achievement of civil rights by channeling resources toward litigation and away from political
organizing. Progressive reformers always have scarce resources. There was great hostility over both fundraising and tactics between the NAACP
and the groups that led the activist wing of the civil rights movement. As Martin Luther King, Jr. complained: "to accumulate resources for legal
actions imposes intolerable hardships on the already overburdened. ' " 9 4 In sum,
Brown's constitutional mandate that racial
segregation in public schools end confronted a culture opposed to that change. The American judicial system,
constrained by the need for both elite and popular support, was unable to overcome this opposition