Only the alternative can produce structural change necessary to challenge Islamophobia – align yourself against the hegemonic discourses that validate US hegemony and structural racism

The case of Abdelfattah reveals the significance of the discourse of the “Muslim terrorist.” In Egypt, this discourse, produced and promoted by US Democrats and Republicans alike, serves as a cover for continuing the punishment, containment, and isolation of anyone who stands in the way of US empire. Thus, every US administration since 1979 (when Egypt and Israel signed the Camp David Accords) has provided Egypt with military, political, and economic support to repress Egyptian people while sustaining Egypt’s status as a partner in advancing US agendas, including Israeli settler colonialism in the region. The United States frames its relationship with Egyptian dictators as an alliance in the “war on terrorism,” a stance that helps rationalize policies such as extraordinary rendition, which outsource the torture as well as the execution of Muslims to places with more lenient torture laws than the United States. At the same time, the United States uses Egypt and other countries as evidence of the need to intervene to “promote democracy.” These contradictions—US alliances with nondemocratic regimes coexisting with the professed goal of promoting democracy—are also apparent in many US leaders’ stances on Israel on the one hand and ending Islamophobia on the other. In early December 2020, UNICEF announced that the Israel Defense Forces killed one Palestinian child and injured four others over a two-week period by shooting them in the chest, eye, and head and that at least 232 children had been injured between January and September 2020.1 Around the same time, Palestinians, Arabs, and US allies around the world heard Kamala Harris’s campaign commitment to unconditionally support Israel, an anti-Arab/anti-Muslim settler colonialist regime, a position that contradicts her own stated condemnation of anti-Muslim domestic policies such as the Muslim ban as racist and discriminatory. While professing to condemn anti-Muslim racism, many Democrats, including Biden and Harris, have supported the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism program, which funds local community institutions to turn their members into spies. Community members are trained to rely upon racial profiling to report anyone perceived to be a practicing Muslim as a potential terrorist.2Indeed, Harris’s close alliance with the US military and Biden’s capitulation to those who support the silencing, killing, and surveillance of Muslims—from Republican Michael Bloomberg who oversaw New York’s racist surveillance of Muslim communities to elected officials who smear critics of Israel as anti-Semitic3—remind us that if we really want to end anti-Muslim racism, we need to be willing to dismantle US-led militarism, warmongering, and empire building. We should therefore be wary of empty rhetoric about ending stereotypes and individual acts of anti-Muslim hatred such as hate crimes and bigotry in the discourse on “tolerance, inclusion, and diversity,” which does nothing to address structural racism.