The case of Ayyub Abdul-Alim fits a decades-long pattern of government criminalization of African-American Muslims. On the night of December 9, 2011, Siham Stewart called her husband, Ayyub Abdul-Alim, as he closed down his corner store, Nature’s Garden, in Springfield, Massachusetts. She asked him to bring home a gallon of milk. A few minutes…
In the early years of its “war on terror”, the US government developed an international system of secret prisons. Those suspected of being Muslim terrorists were secretly captured by the CIA or the US military and flown between these “black sites” in a process called “extraordinary rendition”. We now know that CIA officers used torture…
The UK government tried to disappear Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad to the US, but the basic rules of evidence were unexpectedly applied. Days after Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad were extradited to the US in 2012, the home secretary, Theresa May, began her speech to the Conservative party conference by asking: “Wasn’t it great…
The U.S. government has been snooping on prominent members of the Muslim-American community, according to documents released by National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden and publicized in a story by Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain of the online publication Intercept. That story reveals that the NSA and FBI covertly monitored the emails of five Muslim-Americans who…
A review of Dirty Wars: the World is a Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill (New York, Nation Books, 2013). During his first term in office, Obama’s primary achievement in national security policy was the creation of silence. After the loud, divisive controversies of the Bush years, a bipartisan, media-endorsed consensus emerged. The official line was that invasions, torture, secret…
I was recently asked by Verso Books to list 5 books on political policing that informed my writing of The Muslims are Coming!. 1. If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance by Angela Y. Davis, Ruchell Magee, the Soledad Brothers, and Other Political Prisoners (Orbach and Chambers, 1971) If They Come in the Morning is…
Muslim Americans likely make up the bulk of US domestic spy targets. This is what it’s like for innocent citizens to live in fear. Better oversight of the sprawling American national security apparatus may finally be coming: President Obama and the House Intelligence Committee unveiled plans this week to reduce bulk collection of telephone records.…
London mayor Boris Johnson’s suggestion this week that children of Islamic extremists be taken into care to prevent their being radicalised illustrates perfectly our collective failure to understand the problem of terrorism. After 9/11, so-called terrorism experts funded by governments and neoconservative think-tanks invented the concept of radicalisation to try to explain the violence being…
Homeland’s key accomplishment is to naturalize the workings of the national security state in the Obama era. The show Homeland began its third season with record-breaking ratings. The show’s creators Alex Ganza and Howard Gordon, who previously collaborated on the wildly popular series 24, seem to have worked out a successful narrative for the War on Terror during the Obama era. If 24 reflected the…
The New York Police Department (NYPD)’s program of widespread spying on Muslims is currently on trial in a federal courtroom in Manhattan. Civil rights lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, the CLEAR project of CUNY School of Law and the New York Civil LIberties Union are representing Muslim organizations and individuals in New York…