{"id":14018,"date":"2025-01-26T10:14:01","date_gmt":"2025-01-26T10:14:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/?p=14018"},"modified":"2025-01-26T10:14:03","modified_gmt":"2025-01-26T10:14:03","slug":"removal-and-resistance-reflections-on-anti-muslim-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/?p=14018","title":{"rendered":"Removal and Resistance: Reflections on Anti-Muslim Racism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

White and white adjacent bodies may be buffered by the Muslim, Arab, Black, brown and Indigenous bodies that they push to the frontlines of hate, war, and genocide. But what happens when the buffer is gone? Who will be left?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the widely shared video<\/a> from November 16, 2024, a woman attacks a Muslim Palestinian American couple at a Panera Bread outlet outside Chicago. The husband wears a hoodie with \u201cPalestine\u201d written across it. He tries to shield his wife, who records the attack on her phone. The attacker, later identified as Alexandra Szustakiewicz, repeatedly tries to punch the wife. At one point, as she lunges, Szustakiewicz says, presumably to the husband, \u201cWhat is she<\/em> doing here?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Szustakiewicz was charged with hate crime and disorderly conduct, the husband, later identified as Waseem Zahran, told the press<\/a> he was \u201cpleasantly surprised.\u201d He added, \u201cI did everything I could to not touch her, because I knew, as soon as I did anything, the roles would be reversed. It would be she\u2019s the victim \u2026\u201d Which is what happened at first: the Panera Bread staff consoled Szustakiewicz. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A reason that many folks, myself included, have returned to this story is its visible, nameable testimony of the wide spectrum of racism that Muslims and Arabs experience in the West, from the physical to the verbal and more hidden. That a perpetrator of a hate crime was charged in this rare instance offers a form of catharsis during a year and a half of watching very different videos and outcomes on our phones: Israel\u2019s genocide of Palestinians, executed with absolute impunity, funded and armed by the US and Europe. The same attitudes that propel a horrific continuum of colonial violence in the Global South propel it on a smaller scale in the Global North. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Panera Bread assault took place near where, last year, six-year-old Palestinian-American Wadea Al-Fayoume<\/a> was fatally stabbed by his family\u2019s landlord, Joseph Czuba. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The video documents the impunity that white women share with white men, though white women are rarely racism\u2019s mugshot. Most publicised hate crimes concern attacks by white men, like Joseph Czuba, not white women, like Alexandra Szustakiewicz. As recently as 2021, after the Capitol was stormed by Donald Trump supporters, including many women, historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers told Vox<\/em><\/a>, \u201cThere has been a tendency, from the colonial period to the present, to frame and to position white women as perpetual victims, in spite of the evidence to the contrary.\u201d It is this history that emboldened Szustakiewicz to locate herself as the \u201cruling class\u201d and insert herself as a checkpoint from which to spatially segregate the Palestinian American couple through bodily harm in broad daylight. Though we now know that Szustakiewicz is a European immigrant while the couple were born in the US, she said, \u201cIt\u2019s my land. It\u2019s not your land.\u201d When reminded that the woman she tried to hit was pregnant, Szustakiewicz said, \u201cI don\u2019t care.\u201d It should be noted that since October 2023, pregnant Palestinian women have been forced to give birth in horrific conditions at illegal Israeli checkpoints<\/a>, while the genocide is creating \u201ca generation of orphans<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zahran also told the press, \u201cI always question why is no one doing anything to stop (the genocide of Palestinians). And it\u2019s the same reason why no one helped us.\u201d By \u201cno one\u201d he meant neither the Panera Bread staff nor a single customer. Human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid<\/a> observes that their inaction demonstrates the difference between being \u201cnot racist\u201d \u2013 what many who do nothing consider themselves \u2013 and being anti-racist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Panera Bread subsequently issued a statement<\/a>, but with no apology. It is also true that an apology in hindsight, while essential, isn\u2019t enough. According to the statement, the restaurant \u201cfoster(s) a warm and welcoming environment.\u201d How? What will be different the next time an intervention is needed, and in the moment? The Palestinian American couple had each other this time, beautifully in step: she taking the video, he buffering her. Had either been alone, even with the evidence, it might have played out the way it more often does, as Szustakiewicz tried to frame it, with herself the victim. She has since pleaded not guilty<\/a> and is on pretrial release. Her next court date is set for February 4, 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to linger for a time that parallels when no one looked up, to imagine what a customer present then would now say. Perhaps: \u201cI didn\u2019t know.\u201d How to respond? Deep in the heart of \u201cI didn\u2019t know\u201d rests the myth of American innocence, the building blocks of Fortress Inherent Niceness. In the face of such innocence, do we speculate that had, for instance, a brown man in a hoodie with \u201cPalestine\u201d written across it repeatedly tried to hit a white woman \u2013 they\u2019d know? Or perhaps a customer would say: \u201cI\u2019m not racist, I just don\u2019t like conflict.\u201d Again, what to say? Who likes conflict? Do I share that generations of Muslims have been told to run from conflict, to \u201cjust ignore it,\u201d \u201cbe silent,\u201d \u201clie low,\u201d be \u201cstoic\u201d even when humiliated, profiled and attacked? That this is part of our normalisation? The likeliest scenario, alas, is this: the customer still isn\u2019t looking up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regardless, the video exists, for which I\u2019m grateful. This time, despite all attempts to silence and remove her, a Muslim Palestinian American woman flipped the script. She let her story speak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The culture talk<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alexandra Szustakiewicz\u2019s hatred of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims aligns with the white nationalism of Donald Trump supporters. She made this visible. But conservatives and liberals are united by a history of Islamophobia, including in a refusal to name it as racism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When in January 2017 President Trump issued an executive order banning US entry to people from seven Muslim-majority countries, Republicans and Democrats alike said the ban did not specifically target Muslims. And yet, before the executive order, it was called a \u201cMuslim ban,\u201d and Trump had declared that Christian refugees would be allowed entry. One of my colleagues at the time, a white Christian liberal man, argued that Islam was the great unifier, regardless of race. While presenting himself as tolerant of diversity, he was educating me on how to speak of my own experiences. Another colleague, a white Christian liberal woman, defined racism as anti-Black, anti-Latinx, antisemitic, anti-Asian, anti-Indigenous and anti-immigrant. Therefore, she said, there was no context for including Islamophobia as a form of racial bias. Eight years later, there is still denial of the specific ways that Islamophobia, or anti-Muslim racism, manifests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exclusion and minimising of Islamophobia as an egregious form of racism enables Muslims to be acceptably silenced and removed. It allows anti-Muslim racism to be the lesser evil, if any at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be clear: Islamophobia is not only a hatred or phobia of Islam as a religion, though it is this as well. More widely, Islamophobia is the construction of \u201cMuslim\u201d as a racialized category with narratives tropes built of fear, such as, the men are violent, the women are oppressed. And though not all Muslims are Arabs or Arabic speakers, and not all Arabs are Muslims, members of both groups experience overlapping forms of hate. Too, per the definition<\/a> of the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR), \u201cwhile anti-Palestinian racism is certainly not synonymous with Islamophobia, Muslim and Arab identities have long been conflated, particularly by those who seek to villainize both, making anti-Muslim hate part and parcel of anti-Arab, and specifically, anti-Palestinian racism. Anti-Muslim rhetoric is used to justify anti-Palestinian racism, and anti-Palestinian racism is also weaponized against those presumed to be Palestinian, including Muslims.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Too, every Muslim inhabits multiple intersectional identities. My gender, brownness, faith, art, the languages I shape, country of birth, immigrant status, all, are rivers in a kaleidoscopic sea. Like other forms of racialization, anti-Muslim racism, by assigning fixed identities, shrinks narrative options. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The foremost purpose of Islamophobia is this: to remove Arabs and Muslims perceived to be a threat to empire building, as Arab and Muslim-majority lands are invaded, occupied and bombed. The narrative tropes that oil the machine of empire are so normalised, unquestioned, and omnidirectional that they become, to quote Ugandan writer Mahmood Mamdani, \u201cculture talk<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Waseem Zahran tried not to touch Alexandra Szustakiewicz, he knew the culture talk. When the Panera Bread staff and customers didn\u2019t help the Palestinian American couple, they did too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While a history of segregation and surveillance of Muslims and Arabs stretches back<\/a> to the colonial period, since the end of the Cold War, the US has invaded, occupied and\/or bombed an increasing number of countries. Since 9\/11, under the banner of the still-ongoing \u201cWar on Terror,\u201d these countries and territories total more than 85<\/a>. Islamophobia has enabled surveillance programs like NSEERS (National Security Entry Exit Registration System), which affected 26 countries, 25 of them Muslim-majority; kept Guantanamo prison open; and contributed to a catastrophic refugee crisis, especially in Syria \u2013 the largest refugee crisis since World War II \u2013 Palestine, Afghanistan, and Sudan. The stark contrast<\/a> in the reception of Ukrainian refugees versus Arabs and Muslims is yet another measure of the success of the racist culture talk. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Opening the tent<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last year recorded the highest number of anti-Muslim hate incidents in nearly 30 years (surpassing after 9\/11). In the US alone, in only the first half of 2024, attacks against Muslims rose by 70%<\/a>. This is not including the bigotry that is never recorded, reported, or even named as Islamophobia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That the Biden government released a strategy to counter anti-Muslim and anti-Arab hate in December 2024,  a mere month before Donald Trump\u2019s presidency , was more a commitment of status quo than of new strategy. CAIR\u2019s Deputy Director, Edward Ahmed Mitchell<\/a>, called it \u201ctoo little too late,\u201d adding that it ignored government-driven Islamophobia, such as the federal watch list program, or \u201cTerrorist Screening Database,\u201d of mostly Muslim names. It also ignored a main reason for the current rise in Islamophobia: the US-Israel genocide of Palestinians, Biden\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No strategy to combat Islamophobia in the US can exist without acknowledging the long history of manufacturing it. We don\u2019t even have to look that far. Take, for instance, former vice-president Kamala Harris\u2019 selective racism \u2013 and, by extension, selective sensitivity to racism \u2013 at the Democratic National Convention in August. When Harris refused to \u201copen the tent\u201d to uncommitted delegates, she didn\u2019t need to ask the question that Alexandra Szustakiewicz asked as she lunged for the Palestinian American woman at Panera Bread: \u201cWhat is she<\/em> doing here?\u201d Without a physical slap, or a word, Harris made her<\/em>, and everyone with her, wait outside. Meanwhile, inside the tent: the promise of women\u2019s reproductive freedoms (except Palestinian women\u2019s), of making history as the first woman, Black woman, and South Asian to be president. Most of all: the promise that the privileges of white supremacy extend to women of color who embrace the imperial project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The promise of making history over ruined histories is foundational to this state, built from stolen Indigenous lands and stolen and enslaved African bodies. The overcoming of Jim Crow apartheid laws was repeatedly invoked at the DNC, while critique of Israel\u2019s apartheid laws was kept outside. There were statements of land acknowledgment, while Indigenous Palestinians were being ethnically cleansed. Asian Americans celebrated overcoming the Asian Exclusion Act, and Harris\u2019 Asian-ness, yet among those excluded were Asians. In the name of \u201clesser evil,\u201d her supporters dismissed these double standards. It would not have been the lesser evil had they been the ones facing annihilation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Championing a multicultural empire that divides racial minorities into the chosen and the damned is part of the culture talk, as former US president Barack Obama\u2019s supporters also demonstrated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A correct pronunciation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2008, the year I left Pakistan to teach in the US, I wrote an open letter to then-Senator Obama<\/a>, underscoring that, before his nomination, Obama had been signalling support for war against Pakistan and Iran, and fuelling Islamophobic rhetoric. My teaching appointment was in Honolulu, Obama\u2019s birthplace. There was jubilation when he made history as the first Black president. There were jeers directed my way when I couldn\u2019t participate in the cheer because I feared more war was coming. Hawaii\u2019s long history of anti-colonial struggle<\/a> was supported by Obama supporters. My local and Indigenous students were willing to draw connections across anti-colonial and indigenous solidarity movements. But among my generation (and older) were those who ignored or downplayed Obama authorising more<\/a> drone strikes against Afghanistan and Pakistan in his first year than President Bush in his entire administration, and cheered when Obama won the Nobel peace prize. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

An Obama admirer I knew, a first-generation Asian immigrant from the mainland, said to me one day as we walked to a Hawaii solidarity panel and I worried about the civilian death toll of the war, \u201cAt least Obama can pronounce Pakistan. Bush couldn\u2019t.\u201d I didn\u2019t ask whether correct pronunciation of her home as it was being bombed would offer solace. I\u2019d learned. Whole islands and continents are settled through hobnobbing with one messenger while shooting the other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 2016, Obama had extended the war to seven Muslim-majority countries<\/a>. I\u2019d moved to Massachusetts by then, to teach at an institution where I was the only Muslim woman faculty. For eight years, I\u2019d heard Democrats complain that Republicans \u201caccused\u201d Obama of being a Muslim. Nobody questioned why they, as much as any Republican, considered this an accusation. It was normalised racial code to distinguish acceptable racism from unacceptable, at a time when the media normalised oblique terminology to keep drone wars a \u201ccovert operation.\u201d My grief about the war, as well as about anti-Muslim racism as both culturally encouraged and denied, were also to be kept covert. Meanwhile, three countries \u2013 Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia \u2013 weren\u2019t even considered \u201cbattlefield settings,\u201d as the media kept praising the \u201cexceptionally surgical and precise<\/a>\u201d strikes against \u201cterrorists\u201d in all seven \u201csettings.\u201d No evidence to the contrary appeared on our phones. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shaking a hand<\/strong>

In autumn of 2016, as the world watched the rise of Donald Trump in disbelief, I arrived in Germany for a literature festival. On the last night, I had dinner at a fellow participant\u2019s home. The conversation turned to the upcoming US elections. One guest, a white Norwegian woman, described herself as a feminist, and a fan of Hillary Clinton. I spoke of Clinton\u2019s role as US secretary of state in the escalation of the \u201cWar on Terror.\u201d The guest, ineligible to vote in the US, cut me off: \u201cThen you support Donald Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I paused. I framed a set of questions. If Germany were bombing Norway today, I asked, what would she do? Would she choose between an openly misogynistic and racist candidate and another who\u2019d authorised the bombing of Norway? I added it was unlikely she\u2019d be expected to choose if the \u201clesser evil\u201d had approved the bombing of Europe. Even so, what would she do? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She stared at her plate, red-faced. I was startled by her rage and wondered if she was about to throw the plate at me. Had she, I still wonder what the three others there would have done. She looked up and said, \u201cGo back to Pakistan and fight there.\u201d The two white men at the table, both German, silently scowled. No one was telling the Norwegian to \u201cgo back.\u201d She\u2019d assumed, with the complicity of everyone present, the role of the checkpoint, and it hadn\u2019t taken long, because she\u2019d never been, or tried to be, in any other location. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remembered all the times I\u2019d been removed from a line at an airport or a visa office and interrogated, humiliated, as others passed by. She kept talking, loudly: I was \u201centitled,\u201d presumably for equating the worth of white lives with everyone else\u2019s. I considered offering another word, \u201cuppity,\u201d before mumbling something about white privilege. Predictably, now I was \u201cbringing race into it.\u201d Moments earlier, we\u2019d both brought race into it, when the one thing we\u2019d agreed on was the racism of Donald Trump. Finally, the other person of colour at the table, a German man, spoke \u2013 to change the subject. The tone of the woman softened, and the two engaged happily about other things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I got up to leave, but not before trying to shake her hand; I was raised by parents who never allowed me to leave a gathering without acknowledging everyone. I was raised to just ignore it, even self-remove. She kept her hands by her side and shook her head.

Relaxing<\/strong>
<\/strong>
Within the culture talk there exists many degrees of severity. Always present is intense peer pressure to surgically remove from language the violence of empire; the racism that enables the violence; the intersection of white feminism and imperialism; and even the word \u201cMuslim.\u201d Mahmood Mamdani again: \u201cThe particularly covert nature of language-based anti-Muslim racism serves to sanction discriminatory practices and policies behind a thin mask of plausible deniability.\u201d Through a language of plausible deniability, a good Muslim participates in her own oppression. She doesn\u2019t record it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since October 7, 2023, there have been reports among Muslim civil rights groups of increased FBI contact and mosque visits: a continuation of \u201cWar on Terror\u201d practices. The more oppressive the tactics, the likelier the self-silencing. It means that some forms of intimidation, including casually administered \u2013 say, at a restaurant, or museum \u2013 go largely unreported. When an invisible population is only made visible through dangerous tropes, staying under the radar feels safer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a way that one\u2019s guard comes down in moments meant to be joyous, where we want simply to relax. I think again of the couple at Panera Bread. Instead of an outing and a quick meal, they ended up having to fight for their right to exist. When the Palestinian American woman recorded herself and her husband as victims of violence \u2013 instead of how Szustakiewicz tried to frame it \u2013 she resisted participating in her own oppression. Though not visible in the video, she is audible. Her husband is visible, audible and later named. He received messages of support. He also received death threats and messages wishing ill upon the couple\u2019s unborn child. This was the cost of stepping out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Surreal Labyrinth<\/strong>

The second time I watched the Panera Bread video, I recalled an incident from the month before, in October. I\u2019d been in Paris, where I\u2019d seen the \u201cSurrealism\u201d exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Structured in the shape of a labyrinth, the show was predictably crammed. In physique, I am slight; I assess space carefully for a view. About mid-way, I returned to a section that was a little less crowded than before. I stood, mesmerised, before Remedios Varo\u2019s painting \u201cCiencia in\u00fatil o El alquimista (Useless Science or The Alchemist).\u201d I gazed at the figure seated at the center of the composition, turning a spinning wheel and draped in a checkerboard cloth that merges in sari-like folds with a checkerboard floor. The work had a sublime effect on me. I lingered on the intent, monk-like expression of the face, and the subtle blending of the cloth-floor pattern with the flesh. It is a painting that invites you inside, as though to partake in a creation that is ongoing.

And I was falling inside, my guard down, when I felt a shoulder pressing into mine. \u201cPardon?\u201d I said, turning to face a woman, white or white passing, dressed in a fluffy white jacket. In French, she said I should stand to the side. I was already standing to the side, while she stood, wide-girthed, legs apart, directly in front of the painting. Before I could answer, with both hands at my shoulder, she began pushing, hard. \u201cVa-t\u2019en,\u201d she commanded. Go away<\/em>. I froze. In broken French, I said to look around. It was crowded and she already had a great view. There was no problem! I cautioned myself: don\u2019t make physical contact or she\u2019ll be the victim. She kept arguing: \u201cOui, il y a un probl\u00e8me. Va-t\u2019en!\u201d My husband passed by, and I spoke to him, pointing, telling the room what she was doing. She backed away. The transformation was instant when she saw someone, a man, was with me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What misogyny was this? And I could already hear the gaslighting, those denying it had also to do with being racialised. But I\u2019d lived in France years ago, when I\u2019d frequently been called, with disdain, \u201cL\u2019Arabe.\u201d Now I recognised the hate on her face. Had she kept using force, I\u2019d likely have pushed back. The museum would have joined her in telling me to leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Artists we will never know<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a time, I no longer enjoyed the art. The trance was gone. I recalled Toni Morrison: \u201cThe function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I tried to remember where in the labyrinth I stood. Where to? I moved, somnambulantly, toward Erwin Blumenfeld\u2019s 1937 \u201cLe Dictateur (The Dictator)\u201d, a dark photomontage of a bull\u2019s head on a bust. I stared at the teeth protruding from the bull\u2019s lips, the overlapping images assembled in a snarl, at once goofy and ominous. A scarf tossed in mock stylishness across the dismembered bust seemed to mirror the snarl. Also called \u201cThe Minotaur,\u201d it was one of a series of satirical photographs made by Blumenfeld in response to the rise of fascism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later, at my Airbnb, I looked through my phone. I\u2019d taken one picture of Blumenfeld\u2019s minotaur. In its face, I saw the woman who\u2019d tried to remove me from a space of beauty and wonder, perhaps to a ghetto. I recalled that last year, in a banlieue, a neglected Paris suburb of mostly Muslims, Arabs and Blacks, an unarmed French teenager of Moroccan and Algerian descent, Nahel Merzouk<\/a>, had been shot dead by a police officer at a traffic signal. His killing had led to riots. The face of the composite minotaur began to blur with those images, and with the riots in England<\/a> this summer, following false claims that a mass stabbing had been perpetrated by a Muslim immigrant. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through an online search, I learned that Remedios Varo, who was born in Catalonia to Catholic parents, had been living in Paris at the start of World War II. Because of her communist connections, she was placed in internment camps, though where and for how long is unknown. In 1941, she found refuge in Mexico City, later becoming a dual Spanish and Mexican citizen. Erwin Blumenfeld was born in Germany to Jewish parents. He too had been living in Paris when the war began. He was interned in several camps over a period of two years in France and French-occupied Morocco. In 1941, he found refuge in New York City, later becoming an American citizen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I gazed, now undisturbed, at Varo\u2019s luminous painting on my phone. I let it invite me in again. It struck me that many artists in the show who transported us somewhere between dream and reality were celebrated too for their resistance to authoritarianism. They became \u201cundesirable foreigners\u201d at a time when Asia and Africa were rising up against European colonialism. Freedom movements of the Global South are still being crushed. Colonial powers champion select resistance to select oppression, while expanding a living nightmare of \u201cundesirable foreigners\u201d \u2013 among them, people forcibly removed from their own lands. Among them, artists we\u2019ll never know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Civilian<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In September 2024, while addressing<\/a> the American Israeli Council, Donald Trump announced his intentions to reinstate the Muslim ban when he returns to office. He called it a \u201ctravel ban,\u201d then linked it with \u201cIslamic terrorists.\u201d During his first term, he gradually extended the ban to include non-Muslim-majority countries. What will it be this time? We wait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the meantime, I search for updated year-end statistics on racially motivated crimes. The media and government reports continue to largely unname Muslims and Arabs as target groups. For instance, the Los Angeles County<\/a> report lists, in its heading, \u201cAfrican Americans, Asians, Jewish people, Latino\/as, LGBT individuals, and transgender people.\u201d Within the report itself, in the very last bullet point specific to racially motivated attacks, is added: \u201cCrimes in which there was specific language regarding conflict in the Middle East sharply increased \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where in the \u201cMiddle East\u201d? Who lives there? What \u201cconflict\u201d? Who was removed? By whom? What were their names? What were their dreams? What \u201clanguage\u201d? What \u201ccrimes\u201d? By whom?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shrouding anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and especially anti-Palestinian racism in a veil of plausible deniability through covert language perpetuates the idea that the \u201cMiddle East\u201d is a zone of forever \u201cconflict\u201d brought about by people on themselves, instead of by the violent colonial project of US, Europe and Israel, and funded by US tax dollars. It keeps US voters and tax payers from imagining the connectivity between all lives, across borders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the \u201cother\u201d is removed, the mind that has lost the ability to hold the other is also removed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But international solidarity was the stated purpose of the Geneva Conventions, the international humanitarian laws established after the Second World War. Among their key purposes: to safeguard civilians, through their legal status as \u201cprotected persons<\/a>.\u201d Where were the laws protecting civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the wars waged by the US and Europe in countries linked earlier in this essay? Where are the laws now, when we\u2019ve been watching on our phones, forn sixteen months, Palestinians recording their own extermination? Who are the \u201cprotected persons,\u201d if not the Palestinian babies being bombed, starved, orphaned and frozen, the men and women tortured in detention camps, the journalists, doctors, teachers, cooks, farmers, painters, poets being arrested? Regardless of whether the present ceasefire holds, we can never stop asking: Where  was the intervention? No one can ever say again that we didn\u2019t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn the development of the laws of war,\u201d says Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat in Jadaliyya magazine<\/a>, \u201cbrown and black peoples are considered the savage other. They were evacuated from the category of the civilian to begin with.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To begin with<\/em>. It begins in casual encounters, in our quotidian lives, where the social hierarchies of civic society are enacted to secure the freedoms, needs, and safety of white Europeans and Americans of white European descent \u2013 with the complicity of POCs hoping for a seat at the table \u2013 the folks who try to frame themselves as the victims, while those who ought to be the \u201cprotected persons\u201d are framed as aggressors and terrorists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A disruption<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The anti-genocide student protests that grew around the world in Spring 2024 disrupted this script. Prior to October 2023, those speaking out against Israel\u2019s racial apartheid laws and 76-year-long occupation of Palestine were mostly an isolated group of people from the Global South. The student protesters were from across socioeconomic and racial backgrounds<\/a>. They made visible US complicity in funding, arming and morally enabling the apartheid laws, occupation and genocide. They made visible, too, that the occupation is an extension of European colonialism and settler colonialism, and that it is maintained by the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim culture talk of the corporate media, both liberal and conservative, and by educational and cultural institutions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The brutal crackdown on the student protests only proved their effectiveness in stirring an international consciousness. The police force that used violent counterterrorism tactics<\/a> on the students \u2013 including on white, wealthy American citizens \u2013 receives training from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The crackdown exposed the face of fascism as here, on US soil, not there, in history books. In the words of Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi, what the students achieved is \u201chistorical.\u201d Khalidi was speaking at the launch of the posthumously published If I Must Die<\/em> by poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli air strike in 2023. Interest in Alareer\u2019s lifelong struggle against the occupation, and in Khalidi\u2019s own book, The Hundred Years\u2019 War on Palestine<\/em>, as well as the works of more Palestinian writers than before, is another measure of a shift in narrative. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Narrative \u2013 that emotional and ethical ground \u2013 awakens connectivity. It is why so many Palestinian journalists have been, and are continuing to be, eliminated. Recall again the popularity of the Panera Bread video, the many messages of support for the Muslim Palestinian American couple, and the push back, the messages of hate. Love is an act of solidarity. Those messages of love for the couple were not only about this instance of oppression, but against the systems and structures that select which racisms are egregious, and which should continue unspoken. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There have been other acts of love, solidarity and resistance helping to shift the narrative, including the number of authors who pledged to boycott<\/a> Israeli cultural institutions, and those who withdrew from the PEN festival<\/a> in Spring 2024, in protest of PEN leadership\u2019s silence over the genocide, and its hedging through the tired trope, \u201cIt\u2019s complicated.\u201d PEN CEO stepped down in the fall. As to \u201cit\u2019s complicated\u201d\u2014an evasion normalized by many who wish not to \u201cget involved\u201d while also appearing \u201cnot racist\u201d\u2014perhaps no American writer challenged it with more visibility last year than Ta-Nehisi Coates, who argued that there\u2019s nothing \u201ccomplicated\u201d about a system of racial apartheid, in which half the population is segregated and ruled by laws that don\u2019t apply to the other half. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rise in hate crimes is a warning for everyone. When the systems and structures of empire are shaken internally by collective actions demanding justice, dignity and freedom for all, wars and genocide converge more visibly with domestic oppression. What is true for Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti \u2013 and other countries where lands, lives and resources are stolen for the benefit of the empire \u2013 also plays out, on a smaller scale, for now, in the core of empire. The white supremacist ruling class that profits from war is not as inclusive of all whiteness and select minorities as it may seem. White and white adjacent bodies may be buffered by the Muslim, Arab, Black, brown and Indigenous bodies that they push to the frontlines of hate, war, and genocide. But what happens when the buffer is gone? Who will be left?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reference Link:- https:\/\/thewire.in\/world\/removal-and-resistance-reflections-on-anti-muslim-racism<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

White and white adjacent bodies may be buffered by the Muslim, Arab, Black, brown and Indigenous bodies that they push to the frontlines of hate, war, and genocide. But what happens when the buffer is gone? Who will be left? In the widely shared video from November 16, 2024, a woman attacks a Muslim Palestinian American couple […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14019,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[6511,11298,11300,5404,11301,105,39,6205,11299,11297,11296,7246,7247],"class_list":["post-14018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sample-category","tag-anti-muslim","tag-anti-muslim-lawas","tag-bais","tag-discramination","tag-disrcamination","tag-geopolitics-2","tag-india","tag-racisim","tag-reflections-on-anti-muslim-racism","tag-removal-of-anti-muslim-laws","tag-sentiments","tag-unfair","tag-injustice"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14018"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14020,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14018\/revisions\/14020"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}