Following the September 11 attacks, American tax dollars began to flow to local law enforcement agencies around the country in order to enlist law enforcement in the “war on terror.” The major consequence of this enlistment, as a report on the counter-terrorism industry released by the Political Research Associates shows, is that anti-Muslim trainers have ample opportunity to propagate crude stereotypes about Muslim-Americans to police forces in the U.S. And a driving ideological force behind the percolation of Islamophobic trainings for law enforcement agencies is right-wing Zionism.
I interviewed Thom Cincotta, the author of the Political Research Associates’ report, for a piece on the report that appeared in AlterNet. I asked him to go into detail about the fact that right-wing Zionism in the U.S. feeds anti-Muslim counter-terrorism trainings, and this is what he told me:
All of the rhetoric around these trainings leave very little room for Muslim-Americans to dissent from U.S. foreign policy or domestic counter-terrorism policy. There’s the notion that if anyone is outspoken, then they are providing ideological support for terrorism. When Dr. Zuhdi Jasser testified a few weeks ago before the King hearings, he characterized this as the “pool” where the violent radicals swim. So when you demonize, or paint legitimate advocacy groups or community groups as potential terrorists merely for speaking out against U.S. policy and because there is some vague overlap between the political goals of, say, an al-Qaeda—related to for instance, U.S. occupation of a foreign land—it leaves very little room for dissent and it stifles free speech.
You could see these trainings through the lens that by stigmatizing groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations or the Islamic Society of North America and other groups, in the domestic political sphere, it’s an attempt to silence a key bloc who support Palestinian rights in the United States. Without that vocal bloc pushing Congress, it’s hard to see how U.S. foreign policy with regard to Israel is going to change.
Alex Kane, a freelance journalist based in New York City, blogs on Israel/Palestine and Islamophobia in the U.S. at alexbkane.wordpress.com. Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane.
