Bush’s framing of “Islam is peace” in 2001 to Trump’s unequivocal declaration “I think Islam hates us” in 2016 show the varied discourses of the political elites at the highest levels of the States, which operated to shape media and public attitudes towards Islam and Muslims globally.
This framing by the political leadership in the US precisely illustrates the thesis advanced by Massoumi, Mills, and Miller’s book (Massoumi et al. 2017)39. President Bush’s statement about Islam came at the height of the post 9/11 period, the initiation of planning for direct US military deployment in Afghanistan and later on in Iraq, a policy that needed domestic and international support including from Muslim majority countries.
On 16 September 2001, Bush’s first White House speech and press conference foray into the “War on Terrorism” topic was problematic in the President’s using the term “Crusade” to define the upcoming military mission resulting in a swift and negative response from across the Muslim World. Bush’s statement “This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while” needed language modification to assuage concerns across the Muslim World and countries that had already committed to participating in the upcoming war in Afghanistan (White House 2001a)40.
The “institutions and machinery of the state” reflected on the speech and decided it needed an immediate reframing away from “Crusade” to “Islam is peace” which was done in a hastily arranged public event on 17 September 2001, at a D.C. mosque (White House 2001b)41. Here, the media was an important tool reflecting the priorities and contestations of various forces contributing to public discourse and the framing of the Muslims and Islam in global affairs.
More critically, Bush’s global “War on Terrorism” received the needed congressional support, the US public opinion was solidly behind the invasion of Afghanistan, and the deployment of hostile discourses towards Islam did not serve domestic or international strategic political purposes. At the time, the President and the Republican Party were acting from a post-9/11 domestically secure power base and stoking anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiments was not needed to consolidate and rally public opinion to their side.
On the contrary, the Bush administration made sure to include Muslim voices in their public engagement and Islamic imagery to establish that the “War on Terrorism” was not a war on Islam per se but rather defending shared values against extremism. While a critique of the Orientalist and self-serving aspects of the engagement can be undertaken, this should not distract from the distinct nature of the public discourse strategy itself and the profound difference from the current Trump administration. Pointedly, the deployment of Islamophobia in public discourses is a function of power contestation among political elites in the US and Europe rather than the thesis that it is directly connected to or in reaction to terrorist attacks by individuals professing an affinity to Islam. Clearly, other aspects of President Bush’s domestic and international policy choices had distinct Islamophobic features but the public and official statement maintained the “Islam is peace” framing.
Islamophobia emerges more intensely during and in the aftermath of the election of President Obama and not as an extension of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. A New America report entitled Anti-Muslim Activities in the United States: Violence, Threats, and Discrimination at the Local Level tracked some 757 anti-Muslim incidents across the US from 2012 up to the present day.
The report data was collected and classified based on “five categories: (1) Anti-Sharia Legislation, (2) Opposition to Refugee Resettlement, (3) Opposition to Mosques, Muslim Cemeteries and Schools, and (4) Anti-Muslim Actions and Statements by Elected and Appointed Officials, and (5) Media Reports of Anti-Muslim Violence and Crimes” (McKenzie 2018)42. The report’s author, Robert McKenzie, a Senior Fellow at New America and the founding Director of its Muslim Diaspora Initiative, concluded: “Looking at the statistics, it is clear that the rise in these incidents is tied to the election cycle . . . indicating political rhetoric from national leaders has a real and measurable impact”. (McKenzie 2018)43.
Furthermore, McKenzie observes, “If spikes in anti-Muslim activity only occurred due to terrorism, we would expect to see more incidents following high-profile attacks like the Boston Marathon bombing and Charlie Hebdo, but we didn’t. What we do have are folks running for elected office who are using megaphones to talk about how dangerous Muslims are” (Hussain and Saleh 2018)44.
Elections in the US and Europe have witnessed the intensification of Islamophobia and the use of categories or wedge issues to stoke fear and drive it home to the ballot box. Four of the five categories in McKenzie’s work are instrumental tools to funnel anger and fear into an electoral strategy and monetize it into votes for the far right of the Republican Party. Far-right politicians deploy Muslims and Islam in electoral campaign as a sound-producing drum to bring out scores of voters to secure their seats of power and nothing else.
Islamophobia is a by-product of power and electoral contestation between political elites in Europe and the US in the post-Cold War era. In the case of the US, as the Republicans lost the White House to Obama, and the Congress and Senate in the 2008 election, the populist Tea Party strategy was deployed using Islam and Muslims as the foil to drive right-wing anger for a supposed loss of the country. Former President Obama was the ideal target for the right-wing otherisation strategy considering the complexities of his identity, past and readily documented connection to Islam through his father. The “taking our country back” motto was born immediately after Obama’s election and was laser-focused on Islam and Muslims as the culprits.
Conveniently, the right-wing domestic attacks on Obama as a closet Muslim were mirrored by a demand to correctly reframe the war on terrorism as a war on radical Islam and some demanded a war on Islam itself. President Bush’s “Islam is peace” days were long gone and were replaced by a clamouring to demonise Islam and Muslims while entangling all of Obama’s agenda. The increasing visibility of Islam and Muslims in America’s landscape provided a further opportunity to draw the distinction between the ideal past and the problematic and diverse present represented by the Obama administration.
The demonisation of Islam and Muslims becomes the effective electoral strategy and Islamophobia is monetised into the 2010 Tea Party and right-wing votes at the ballot box. The leader of the Birther Movement is settling in the White House with the Alt-right arriving in Washington DC riding the Islamophobic ballot box and hitched to the “Clash of Civilisations” cultural racism stage wagon right out of the gate. The mainstream Republicans played along with the bigoted and racist fringe so as to get part of their agenda adopted, but ended-up being devoured by it in the process. More broadly, the current White House is a den of the Islamophobic fringe that slipped its way into the halls of power by combining a toxic mixture of extreme bigotry towards Muslims, refugees, immigrants, and all minorities with a deep-rooted conspiratorial worldview. Demonising Muslims was an easy prod, used as an instrument to foment fear and drive bigotry into a fever pitch during the election cycle and then monetised into votes at the ballot box.
Let’s go back to Trump’s statement “I think Islam hates us” and grasp the significant shift away from Bush’s framing. On several occasions during the 2016 campaign and on TV, Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”. In the same interview he said that “Islam hates us”, Trump also mentioned that, “we are at war with Islam”. At times when pressed by journalists on the subject of banning Muslims, Trump included radical Islam in the response and then pivoted to demand extreme vetting for immigrants and refugees from the Muslim world, as if none existed at the time.
Trump continued, “It’s radical, but it’s very hard to define. It’s very hard to separate. Because you don’t know who’s who?” Thus, the inclusion and the constant references to Islam are not incidental but reflect a deep-seated antagonism and open hostility that is shared by Trump’s inner circle of advisors and operatives who collectively share the Clash of Civilisations worldview and intend on acting upon it. It’s critical to remind everyone that the supposed “Clash of Civilisations” is a highly contested thesis and Trump’s inner circle are proposing to test it in the lab represented by the US and the Muslim world.
Stephen K. Bannon, Michael T. Flynn, Jeff Sessions, Frank Gaffney, John Bolton, and other Trump advisors and appointees are ideological advocates of the Clash of Civilisations worldview and are delighted at the opportunity to bring their thesis to the testing ground.
Early on, Bannon described the conflict as one of a “long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam”, while Flynn, the disgraced national security advisor, framed it as “a world war against a messianic mass movement of evil people, most of them inspired by a totalitarian ideology: Radical Islam. But we are not permitted to speak or write those two words, which is potentially fatal to our culture”. For Flynn, Islam is a cancer, “a political movement masquerading as a religion and the product of an inferior culture”. In a recently released book, Flynn argued that, “I don’t believe that all cultures are morally equivalent, and I think the West, and especially America, is far more civilized, far more ethical and moral” (Diehl 2016)45.
The key framing for Trump’s war on Islam was expressed most clearly by Bannon back in 2014, when he situated the on-going wars in the Arab world through a historical lens and part of a long struggle between Islam and Judeo-Christian world: “If you look back at the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam, I believe that our forefathers kept their stance, and I think they did the right thing. I think they kept it out of the world, whether it was at Vienna, or Tours or other places (. . . ) We’re in a war of immense proportions. It’s very easy to play to our baser instincts, and we can’t do that. But our forefathers didn’t do it either. And they were able to stave this off, and they were able to defeat it, and they were able to bequeath to us a church and a civilization that really is the flower of mankind” (Diehl 2016)46.
Here, it is important to point out the dubious trans-historical claim of a singular and unified Judeo-Christian world, a recent construct that emerges only after WWII. In reality, European history is but a long series of pogroms, death, and destruction visited upon the Jews and other minorities; events like the Inquisition and the Holocaust are the logical culmination of the norm, rather than an exception when history is examined closely. I would maintain that a Judeo-Muslim world is a far more accurate description of history than Bannon’s obfuscation and attempt at reading back into history the current Palestinian-Israeli conflict while absolving Christian Europe of its never-ending anti-Semitism that provided the ideological and theological railroad tracks that led to the camps and the Holocaust (Shane 2017).47
Islam becomes the new foil through which Trump, Bannon, Flynn, and other Clash of Civilisations warriors make it possible to cleanse the blood that fills the pages of the European and Western history. Islam becomes the all-encompassing problem that threatens and undermines Western civilisation rather than the rich and powerful 1% that have pursued a scorched-earth social, economic, military, and political policy that left the 99% behind. Trump and his ‘Clash of Civilisations’crew worked to mobilise, mine, and manipulate historical memories to foment a global war which would prove their thesis if it takes place. Devastation of the world to prove an ignorant thesis is a very high price for humanity to pay.
By positing Islam as the problem, the Islamophobes can mobilise the needed arguments for constant military intervention, strengthening partnership with Israel and frame it as the model to emulate on security issues, express support for autocratic dictators in the Arab world, rationalise torture and restrictions on movements of Muslims and others, impose limits on fundamental freedoms and push for securitisation of the Western society itself. Trump is a foreman of the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ administration intent on pushing for a confrontation with Islam. All that is needed is Islamophobia and the most draconian policies are sanctioned and democracy itself becomes a vehicle for securitisation. The post-Cold War looks more like the Cold War but far more invasive, divisive, and costly.
Consequently, Trump’s “Make America great again” is precisely a calling for a restoration to an idealised and glorified past where the political, social, and religious order was situated around a singular identity to the exclusion of others. What caused America’s weakness, according to the populist Islamophobic right-wing, are the wrong-headed multi-culturalism, political correctness, identity politics, affirmative action, refugees, illegal immigration, and burdensome regulations. Added to this list is the constant blame levied on Mexico, China, Japan, and Europe for cheating America on trade deals or not being fair on the market.
Notice that all these facts point to someone or something other than the country’s elite, which has plundered the US, ravaged the Earth of its resources, conducted endless interventionist wars, and squandered the hard-earned money of hard-working people. The populists mobilise ignorant bigotry to obfuscate the real causes for the country’s circumstances. Islamophobia as an ideology makes it possible to push for a ‘Clash of Civilisations’ or cultural racism in order to create the needed urgency to rescue a distant past.
(to be concluded)