How One Man Refused to Spy on Fellow Muslims for the FBI — and Then Lost Everything

Co-authored with Emily Keppler and Muki Najaer 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…

Stop spying on Muslim-Americans

Co-authored with Deepa Kumar 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…

No NSA reform can fix the American Islamophobic surveillance complex

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.…

Boris Johnson’s radicalisation myth-making

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 and the Imagination of National Security

Homeland’s key accomplishment is to naturalize the workings of the national security state in the Obama era. Co-authored with Deepa Kumar. 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…

The disturbing implications of the NYPD’s defense of its Muslim spying program

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…