Civil Rights in Peril: The Targeting of Arabs and Muslims.(Book Review)

Civil Rights in Peril:

The Targeting of Arabs and Muslims

By Elaine C. Hagopian, ed.

Pluto Press, 320 pages

These three books examine the racialization of Arabs and Muslims since 9/11. Racialization is the process of selectively adopting ideas about Arabs and Muslims (or anyone who seems like them, such as South Asian Sikhs) as being fundamentally different from others. Racialization is at the root of the naive "Why do they hate us" question. In this framework, because Arabs and Muslims can never be part of "us," it seems impossible to get to the complex, multilayered issues of race and identity, to examine worthy critiques of U.S. policy or to explore the intersection of race, gender, class and nationalism. Instead, racialization preempts engaged discussion about power relationships and various communities in favor of books about the "Arab mind," "Introductory Islam," or what is "behind the veil." In other words, Arabs and Muslims are so different that they need to be explained, whereas we can take for granted that white, Christian Americans are the norm.

A tremendous amount is at stake in seriously thinking about these books. Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, said that he could foresee a situation in which the public would demand Arab internment camps. While denying his own support of such camps, he warned that if another terrorist attack occurred, the "groundswell of opinion" for detainment would be hard to prevent. In 2003, Howard Coble, the new chair of the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on terrorism and domestic security, claimed that attacks on the U.S. generated the appropriate response of Japanese displacement and detention. He asserted that the Japanese needed "protection" from outrage but indicated that "[s]ome [Japanese-Americans] probably were intent on doing harm to us, just as some of these Arab-Americans are probably intent on doing harm to us." During a recent speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation, U.S. Representative Sue Myrick, a Republican from Charlotte, North Carolina, decscribed the supposed danger of terrorism from Arabs living in the U.S.: "[L]ook who runs all the convenience stores ... Every little town you go into, you know?" These books not only trace catastrophic anti-Arab, anti-Muslim stereotyping and demonization, particularly after 9/11, they also provide frameworks for progressive attempts to destroy the "us" versus "them" discourse at work.

Elaine Hagopian's edited anthology cogently explores three themes: the persecution of Muslims and Arabs before and after 9/11; the media-sponsored construction of Arabs and Muslims as racialized Others; and the use of the first two themes to justify U.S. foreign policy under the Bush administration. In the first section, articles by Susan Akram, Kevin Johnson and Nancy Murray argue that numerous attacks on Muslims and Arabs amount to denying that these communities are political beings with varied aspirations, identities and beliefs. They show that U.S. government and legal ...