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…
Blair’s simplistic formula for tackling radical Islam is leading him to support some of the most oppressive forces in the region. Tony Blair’s speech this week at Bloomberg in London reveals a growing support for authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. A decade ago, Blair was justifying wars in the Middle East on the grounds that they would…
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. 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 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…
Since the bombing of the Boston marathon – in which three people, including a child, were killed and more than 200 injured – attention has naturally focused on what could have been done to prevent it. Some, such as Rep. Peter King, the New York Republican who chairs the Homeland Security Committee, have argued for increased surveillance of Muslims…
Since 2004, the term ‘radicalisation’ has become central to terrorism studies and counter-terrorism policy-making. As US and European governments have focused on stemming ‘home-grown’ Islamist political violence, the concept of radicalisation has become the master signifier of the late ‘war on terror’ and provided a new lens through which to view Muslim minorities. The introduction…
In this essay for the journal Critical Muslim, I explore the new strands of far-Right mobilization in Europe, such as the English Defence League, and locate their “counter-jihad” ideology in the context of the War on Terror. More information.