Anti-terrorist discourse and policies partake in a violent process of “dehistorization” which conceals the legacy of hegemonic bloodshed

In the field of political science, rational choice theory often guides our understanding of political violence. In government institutions, the logic of security dictates all manner of invasive action against citizens and foreigners alike (e.g., NSA). Both logics suffer from an utter neglect of context. All too often, violent political events are dehistoricized, appearing as spontaneous psychoses of the body politic whose symptoms could be treated given the proper level of government and social intervention. The logics that emerge from rational choice theory and the security discourse depend upon both an abstraction and a normalization of social objects. As such, they work to cover-over histories and legacies that exert substantial influence on the subjectivities of the social objects they seek to manage. Our primary concern, I shall argue, should be centered on the legacies of colonialism and liberalism that continue to exert influence on our political projects. These are background conditions that too often evade our scrutiny despite their importance in framing our conventional understanding of political events. The discourses that both promote and oppose Islamophobia and antiSemitism potentially serve the projects of Western imperialism, neo-colonialism, and ethnocentrism when they are uncritically reproduced. They reveal a desperate attempt to demarcate the space between “us” and “them,” to reproduce a Cartesian division of the social world that could guide our rational politics by simplifying our interactions along functionalist lines (Walker 1992). The threat of Islam (or the threat to secular society) in France is counteracted by la€ıcite, a policy that affirms a pure French national identity at the same time as it reveals (through a negative relation) the heterodox identity of the French citizenry that must be marginalized. In America, it is not uncommon to hear the demand placed on the Muslim community to monitor their members in order to allay the fears of violent manifestations of radical Islam on Main Street. It is taken for granted that an individual who might identify as Muslim is thereby held accountable for all other varied forms of Muslim identity. Similarly, the recent violence against Jewish communities in Europe appears to be guided by the presumptive complicity of all Jews for the violence perpetrated by the Israeli government. All these concerns have developed alongside the recent history of American and European military intervention and coercions in the “Muslim world.” In Israel, the threat of an emerging fifth column, and the so-called demographic time bomb birthed from Palestinian wombs, is invoked while the occupation and colonialist roots of the state are actively marginalized in public and academic discourse. The U.S. war on terror continues under the guise of a security logic at the same time as it disavows, through silence, the violent legacy of Western hegemony over the Middle East.