For decades, US and European governments, as well as corporate media, have been condemning authoritarian repression and violence against women in the Global South – from Africa, to the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific Islands and Latin America. And tragically, these same voices have too frequently misused grassroots human rights and feminist struggles to push for violent military interventions.
As an Arab-American professor and activist, I have witnessed over 30 years of repression within the US against feminist and queer people of color, and those involved in racial justice, anti-war, and decolonial social movements. I often wonder, where is the international outcry over repression and misogyny within the United States?
Given the recent escalation of US repression of Black and Palestinian activists, it is more clear than ever that railing against authoritarian repression in the Global South is a far cry from real concern over peoples’ freedom. It is especially hypocritical to demand an end to gender violence in the Global South when the US was not only founded upon rape and sexual assault as a tool of enslavement and colonisation, but also continues to rely on sexualised violence to dominate BIPOC communities. Consider the more than 1,200 reports of sexual assault and the controversy over hysterectomies targeting immigrant women in ICE custody; the forced sterilizations of Native and Black women; and police sexual violence.
Sensationalising human rights abuses abroad turns public attention away from such human rights abuses in the US and helps maintain the fiction of the US as a democratic nation state with equal rights and freedom for all.
Solidarity with Palestine
It is no surprise that many anti-imperialist Black activists and feminists from the Civil Rights era to today have stood in strong solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.
This solidarity was always global in scope, as it was forged in the 1970s context of global anti-imperialist liberation movements and a shared consensus that the Cold War sidetracked liberation movements across the world, and that they were being co-opted by military and corporate elites, finance capital, and efforts to control resources and create a new imperialism.
This internationalist frame conceptualised South Africa and Palestine as key sites of Western neo-imperialism and identified them as locations whose struggles were intrinsically connected to all forms of anti-colonial critique. It was in this context that instances of feminist solidarity such as the alliance between the US-based Union of Palestinian Women’s Association (UPWA) and the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA) emerged.
Continued FBI surveillance and repression of Black, Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim residents expanded such solidarity. A principal example of this is the FBI’s 1996-2000 investigation into Chicago-area Muslim Americans called Vulgar Betrayal, which eventually encompassed nearly every FBI field office and impacted the lives of hundreds of citizens or legal permanent residents. Algerian-American Assia Boundaoui, who uncovered this operation, produced the film ‘The Feeling of Being Watched,’ in which she documents how FBI surveillance trickles down into the everyday lives of Arab-American Muslim youth, families and communities in the form of paranoia, distrust, fragmentation, and the destruction of community relations and philanthropy.
In 2008, the Bush administration attorney general, Michael Mukasey, authorised a new kind of investigation called an “assessment,” which required no factual basis for suspecting wrongdoing before allowing agents to employ intrusive investigative techniques like surveillance and database searches. In 2009, a memo from the Atlanta FBI revealed that fears of a “Black Separatist” terrorism threat justified an “assessment” of the growing Black population in Georgia.
The blame game
This meshes with the reality of law enforcement today focusing on Black-led activism rather than white extremists carrying out violence. In 2017, the American Civil Liberties Union noted community fears that the category of a Black terrorism threat was “created to justify surveillance of, and other government action against, Black people, including Black activists”. Such fears are, of course, well founded.
The events of the summer of 2014 especially helped consolidate the increased solidarity between Palestinian and Black social movements in the US. Protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, faced the military-grade weapons of four city and state police departments – tear gas, smoke bombs, stun grenades and tanks – while Gazans were confronting Israel’s heavy artillery shelling, massive use of flechettes, mortars, and half-ton to one-ton missiles.
Activists forged solidarity around several points of unity, including how the canisters fired in both Gaza and Ferguson were US-made, as well as how the St Louis County Police Department, which killed Michael Brown and initially placed Ferguson on siege, had trained with the Israeli military. Following Ferguson, the FBI used sophisticated surveillance aircraft technologies to police BLM protests after the killing of Freddie Gray in 2018 and has continued to do so.
Today, these alliances continue to grow, especially through a conjoined struggle committed to resisting the US government’s application of the ‘counter-terrorism’ framework to smear, police, and surveil both Palestinian and US-based Black resistance movements. For example, local joint terrorism taskforces ‘visit’ activists from the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), blaming them for “inciting violence”.
In 2019, the US publicly disclosed its concept of “racially motivated violent extremism”. Under the guise of stopping white supremacist violence, this terminology enables the ongoing repression of Black-led resistance movements against police violence. Today, more and more coalitions are arising in response to the US’s scapegoating of Black and Arab communities as ‘threatening’ to the state.
Opposing Zionist movements
Black-Palestinian solidarity has also emerged against Zionist movements that have worked to reinforce the repression of Black and Palestinian movements. Groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have spied on Palestinian, civil rights and anti-apartheid activists. The ADL has also attacked the Palestine-related efforts of M4BL and sought to block activistsfrom using the language of apartheid in their critiques of Israeli settler-colonialism. The organisation also contributed to commentator and university professor Marc Lamont Hill losing his job at CNN over his support for Palestinians and Jews holding equal rights in one secular state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
The Biden administration has so far failed to reject Israel’s labeling of six Palestinian civil society organisations as ‘terrorist’ groups
Left-leaning BIPOC feminist and queer movements that have committed to solidarity with Palestinian liberation have been key targets of repression. I will never forget when, in 2004, the Ford Foundation rescinded a $100,000grant awarded to INCITE! Women and Gender Non-Conforming People against Violence, after our organisation published a statement supporting Palestinian liberation.
The US and Zionist repression of activists in the US extends globally, to places the US is invading and/or dominating. Today, the effects of the US’s alliance with Israeli repression against Palestinians is reaching deep into Palestinian civil society, as is the work of groups like the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor, which have been promoting attacks on Palestinian civil society groups for many years.
The Biden administration has so far failed to reject Israel’s labeling of six Palestinian civil society organisations as ‘terrorist’ groups. State Department spokesperson Ned Price has been entirely weak in response. “We’ll be engaging our Israelis partners for more information regarding the basis for these designations” is obviously meaningless at a time when Israel is trying to shut down three organisations that are documenting its human rights violations for the International Criminal Court, and another three engaged in vital work in the community.
Israel has also tried to shut down free speech in the US by advocating for laws against the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement (BDS). Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the US, earlier this year called on 35 states with anti-BDS laws to sanction Ben & Jerry’s over its decision to stop selling its ice cream in illegal Israeli settlements.
Erdan’s letters to US governors read: “I ask that you consider speaking out against the company’s decision, and taking any other relevant steps, including in relation to your state laws and the commercial dealings between Ben and Jerry’s and your state.” Those that follow his advice are favoring Israel over a US company, free speech and most importantly over equal rights and freedom for Palestinians.
These laws violate First Amendment rights – rights that were always meant to primarily protect white middle-class people (and originally wealthy white landowners) rather than ‘all Americans’. The laws are also devastating Palestinian and Arab students’ lives by compounding the fear and intimidation they face on campus if they campaign for Palestinian rights, intensifying that already imposed by the McCarthy-like targeting of individuals by groups like Canary Mission.
Limitations on free speech through anti-BDS laws and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, alongside efforts to divide Palestinian and Black activists, are intended to create an atmosphere in which supporters of Palestinian liberation are fearful and immobilised. They also support and sustain sexualised racism against Palestinian students, such as the threat of castration received by Ahmad Daraldik at Florida State University and misogynist cyberbullyingthat paints Palestinian women activists as “whores”.
A wider web of repression
Repression is an ever-growing concern in the US – far beyond its impact on Black and Arab activism. Consider the surveillance of Indigenous people involved in struggles like Standing Rock or the attempts to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory. Refuse Fascism analyses “the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in this country”, whether it is led by the Republican Party or whether it is sustained by Democrats, who “will consistently pull to try to work with, conciliate with and collaborate with [Republicans]”.
Yet we have learned from history that measures like these can have the opposite effect, proving to be a galvanising factor.
Addressing these issues now is particularly timely with the recent newsthat two of the alleged killers of Malcolm X in 1965, both Black Muslim men, who were hastily arrested on shaky evidence and became victims of the very injustices Malcolm X denounced, were deemed innocent. In the aftermath of his assassination, prosecutors, the New York Police Department and the FBI withheld key evidence that probably would have resulted in the acquittal of the two men. The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R Vance, has apologised and said they “did not get the justice that they deserved”. Both men spent more than 20 years in the brutal New York prison system, often in solitary confinement. Only Muhammad Aziz is still alive today.
The role of prison
US-based prison abolitionists have long critiqued the cruel history of wrongful convictions of BIPOC individuals through police torture and frame-ups.
In Chicago alone, there is a backlog of over 500 cases of alleged police torture and frame-ups involving primarily Black and Latinx men who remain incarcerated for life for crimes they did not commit. I work with mothers who have been fighting for their children’s freedom for decades while enduring devastating health and economic challenges. They often remind me of mothers in Egypt, like the beloved Laila Soueif, who has been the focus of many international human rights stories about the authoritarian regime’s frame-up of her son, Alaa Abdulfattah, who helped lead the Egyptian revolution of 2011.
Black feminist abolitionists have insisted upon fighting against the criminalisation and incarceration of BIPOC women, queer and transgender survivors of gender violence such as Marissa Alexander who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for defending her life from an abusive estranged husband. Transgender abolitionists are resisting invasive, transphobic airport surveillance and the ways police specifically ensnare and criminalise trans people of color.
History and the FBI
Unfortunately, these realities, rarely heard on the global stage of human rights, are as appalling as the histories that shaped them. The history of the FBI’s repression through surveillance began long before its recent investigations of Muslim and Black communities.
J Edgar Hoover, who headed the FBI at the time of Malcolm X’s assassination, was no friend of the Civil Rights Movement or Black resistance to rampant white supremacy. This resistance continued the struggle against centuries of enslavement and rebellions. It is this history, however, that people like Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin in Virginiaseek to whitewash and prevent children from learning in schools.
Visions for a radically different future must affirm life, interconnectedness, and the conjoining of all movements for human rights, gender justice, liberation, abolition and decolonisation
Hoover’s FBI had a history of focusing its attention against Black organising to secure rights and justice rather than on white efforts to violently oppress Black people in the US South and elsewhere. It’s unsurprising, therefore, that in 1919, as director of the FBI’s precursor, the General Intelligence Division, Hoover investigated Marcus Garvey for allegedly associating with radicals. He couldn’t pin any violations of federal law on Garvey, but the Justice Department eventually accused him of trumped-up mail fraud charges in 1923.
Mike German notes in The Guardian that “white vigilantes, police and soldiers targeted Black communities with violence [and I would add sexual assault and rape] during this period, which included the Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa massacre of 1921 and scores of lynchings”, yet these violent acts of heterosexist racist terror “did not receive the same focused attention from Hoover’s agents”. Nonetheless, when the movie ‘Mississippi Burning’ came out in 1988, it deceitfully lionised the role of the FBI in advancing the Civil Rights Movement.
If people living in the US aren’t getting their history whitewashed then all too often it’s being revised to center the victimiser and downplay the real defenders of freedom.
Ever since the FBI’s inception, it has treated Black-led activism as a national security threat and suppressed Black social movements. Consider the counter-insurgency programs of the Cold War era that grouped both Black and Arab activists into the same “threat/enemy of the nation” framework.
The FBI’s COINTELPRO programme, which attempted to label homegrown resistance movements as under the thumb of Communist influence, relied upon informants, blocked donations, and used fearmongering to repress Black resistance. It intentionally targeted Black women activists. Hoover, for instance, directly targeted The Sojourners for Truth and Justice, a Black Leftist feminist group.
This history has profound relevance today in racist and misogynist red-baiting, as with the questioning by Republican Senator John Kennedy of Asian-American Professor Saule Omarova, President Joe Biden’s nominee to serve as head of the Office of the Comptroller of Currency. It also extends into the US government’s recent targeting of the Movement for Black Lives, founded by three Black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Opal Tometi, with its explicit feminist and queer politics. Such targeting inspired the book authored by Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele, ‘When they Call you a Terrorist’.
President Richard Nixon’s 1972 Operation Boulder, an offshoot of COINTELPRO developed in alignment with the US’s alliance with Israel, targeted Arab immigrants in the US for special investigation with the specific purpose of intimidation, harassment, and the repression of their activism. Surveillance programmes like Countering Violent Extremism and cases like the US’s deportation of Palestinian American community organiser and survivor of Israeli sexualized torture Rasmea Odeh, have continued this legacy. While denying Odeh a fair trial, the judge overseeing her case condoned rape culture. He prevented her from discussing a sexual assault experience that was crucial to the case, diminishing her experience of what he called “torture, rape, and all that stuff”, while protecting her perpetrators in Israel and supporting their sexist, racist narratives about her.
I am especially inspired by the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s reminder that the repression of activism is a feminist issue; that love must guide liberation; and that visions for a radically different future must affirm life, interconnectedness, and the conjoining of all movements for human rights, gender justice, liberation, abolition and decolonisation.
Living in Chicagoland while originally from the Middle East and North African (MENA) region, I am compelled to view police violence in Chicago through a global lens. This past week, the Chicago Alliance against Racist and Police Repression (CAARPR) released its report about the more than 600 individuals incarcerated through police torture and frameups, many serving life sentences. Chicago’s torture survivors have names and faces. Antonio Porter, Frank Ornelas, Nick Escamila, Tamon Russell, Matthew Eschevarria (who caught long-term COVID-19 in prison), and Rosendo(suffering from a life threatening heart disease) and Juan Hernandez are among them.
Reading the report’s data about the cruel forms of mental or physical torture each survivor endured led me to think of our beloved family friend, Alaa Abdel Fattah, the Egyptian blogger and activist who was one of the key voices of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 for bread, dignity, and social justice. Since 2011 (except for a few short months), Alaa has been held in a high security prison and tortured on false charges as part of a U.S.-backed Egyptian government strategy to crush dissent. In October, 2021, he faced yet another charge of spreading “fake news.” Alaa is not alone. He is among thousands of Egyptian activists who are languishing in Egypt’s prison industrial complex.
One of the differences, though, between torture in Chicago and Egypt, is that U.S. presidential administrations and the corporate media have been condemning the latter, while remaining silent on the former. A quick google search pulls up thousands of sensationalist articles—“Syria’s torture prisons,” “Chilling Torture in Iraq,” or “Horrific Torture in Yemen—about torture in the MENA region. The repetition in these stories helps affirm the great racist stereotype that while the U.S. is a free country, Arab and Muslim societies are the most oppressive in the world.
It is no coincidence that government and media rhetoric also cover up the role of the U.S. in backing regimes like Israel and Egypt whose police and military systematic torture people in MENA. Deceitfully, the Biden administration, while publicly condemning torture in Egypt, promised 1.2 billion to Egypt’s President Sisi in military aid and named Sisi a “vital partner” in its November “Strategic Dialogue.”
As a child, my family used to watch elected U.S. officials criticize authoritarian repression in the Middle East on TV while they supported violent military and economic interventions that devastated entire communities in the same breath. We watched the U.S.-back Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein in order to thwart Iran in the 1980’s only to later destroy Iraq, and Saddam, in the name of “democracy and human rights.” Living between two worlds, we understood the U.S.’ call for “human rights” in MENA more as a justification for military and economic intervention than as an expression of genuine support for the freedom of our people.
The devastation the U.S. caused in the lives of our Iraqi kin broke our hearts. In addition to the destruction of Iraq and the half million people who have died, Professor Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Michigan, reminds us of the continued effects of the Iraq war. The U.S., for instance, left without cleaning up the military pollutants that remain in U.S. military junkyards. They continue to poison Iraqis long after the bombs.
George and Laura Bush justified the war through the rhetoric of helping Iraqis, especially women. Yet on the ground, pregnant women continue to birth babies with disabilities at alarming rates, baby teeth and bone marrow are now full of depleted uranium, cancer is skyrocketing, and the uranium released in the air continues to contaminate food, air, and water–all of which disproportionately burden women.
I work with a collective of mothers of police torture survivors in Chicago who call themselves Mothers of the Kidnapped (MOK). Their stories further convince me of the deceitful nature of U.S. rhetoric about defending human rights. Beyond justifying global wars, this rhetoric turns public concern towards stereotypical places like “the Middle East” and away from the ongoing denial of human rights and democracy, especially for working class people of color, here in the United States.
Despite the conviction of infamous torture cop Jon Burge in 2010, many Chicago police officers are still engaging in the torture of suspects for the purpose of obtaining confessions. This continues now, with state law requiring the video recording of all interrogations. Some of these cops are trained in these violent interrogation techniquesby an Israeli military that hypocritically spreads propaganda about “violent” “abusive” Arabs and Muslims while violating Palestinian human rights.
In Chicago, the police seemed to have moved from physical torture alone to a pattern of psychological torture, following the Reid Technique developed by CPD Detective John Reid. It was used most notoriously in the case of the Central Park Five in New York Citybut also to wring a “confession” from the son of April Ward, a member of MOK. April’s son Mickiael Ward was charged with the 2013 murder of high school athletic cheerleader Hadiya Pendelton in Chicago. In many, perhaps most cases, forced confessions are the only evidence used to convict people.
Like Laila Souief in Egypt, the mothers of Chicago’s torture survivors have been fighting a cruel justice system that obstructs due process every step of the way. CAARPR, with MOK, turned their database over to the Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx with the demand that she vacate the convictions and dismiss the charges. They also demanded that Governor J. B. Pritzker pardon torture survivors.
Waiting endlessly to be reunited is the most egregious human rights abuse Chicago’s torture survivors and their loved ones seem to endure. MOK members report that once their children finally get their cases back into court for review, they face a pattern of more delays caused by alleged illnesses of prosecutors, police witnesses, and judges; incomplete paperwork; or unexplained court cancellations. Survivors consistently face officers who simply don’t show up to court, lose paperwork, and repeatedly postpone court dates.
Illinois is the only state with a commission created by state law to examine cases of police torture, although it is known that such cases are common throughout the country. Yet even after the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission refers a case to court for review, torture survivors and their loved ones endure an average of five years before it is resolved. Some mothers have spent decades waiting for judges to abide by court decisions ordering new trials for their children. Torture survivors face the suppression of tortured confessions and judges regularly send subjects back to prison for life, as in the cases of Gerald Reed and Clayborn Smith.
This is why the voices of prison abolitionists in the MENA region and in the US have been echoing one another in their analysis that policing and prisons were never meant to be just. I hope these voices will continue to grow in unison until, as scholar-activist Angela Davis puts it, prisons, police, torture, and all forms of violence are obsolete.
TRUTHOUT—The U.S. is now more than 20 years beyond the Patriot Act of October 2001. The immediate aftermath of 9/11 brought a heavy U.S. state focus on Arabs and Muslims in the U.S., rationalizing an expansion of policing and surveillance activities against them. It also inspired the convergence of shared struggles for liberation out of a growing consensus that we cannot abolish policing without abolishing U.S. militarism and empire building.
The “anything goes” context of 9/11 opened up possibilities for expanded forms of policing and surveillance that are unconstitutional. The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), also known as “special registration,” put in place by the Department of Justice in 2002, targeted Arabs and Muslims as well as those from the Middle East and South Asia. Overly broad interpretations of “material support” laws denied people — generally Arabs and Muslims — their freedom and even threatened some forms of humanitarian aid.
But none of this was entirely new. All this was preceded by President Richard Nixon’s “Operation Boulder,” which law professor Susan M. Akram has described as “perhaps the first concerted US government effort to target Arabs in the US for special investigation with the specific purpose of intimidation, harassment, and to discourage their activism on issues relating to the Middle East.”
Ironically, Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 Oklahoma City attack opened the door to the Clinton administration pushing forward a legislative effort allowing the government “to use evidence from secret sources in deportation proceedings for aliens suspected of terrorist involvement. Under the measure, the government would not have to disclose the source of the damaging information to the person whom it is seeking to deport,” The New York Times reported. A white extremist, then, had carried out a deadly bombing, but it was Arabs and Muslims (including Black Arabs and Black Muslims) who faced the prospect of deportation without ever being able to confront their accuser — or even know the identity of those accusing them.
The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act established a new court charged only with hearing cases in which the government seeks to deport aliens accused of engaging in terrorist activity based on secret evidence submitted in the form of classified information. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act expanded the secret evidence court so that secret evidence could be more easily used to deport even lawful permanent residents as terrorists.
As Arab and Muslim communities were subjected to institutionalized racial profiling, this too frequently encouraged individual anti-Arab and Islamophobic actors who further intimidated and committed acts of violence against Arab and Muslim individuals in everyday life. Between 2000-2009, these violent incidents increased by over 500 percent; since 2016, 484 incidents of hate-motivated violence have been reported and many continue to remain unreported. In the Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian regions, of course, the U.S. military killed people en masse while engaging in torture. The U.S. government also supported authoritarian dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak who would further the U.S. imperialist agenda and simultaneously collaborate in the ongoing colonization of Palestine and siege of Gaza.
According to the Project on Government Oversight’s Jake Laperruque, the U.S., in its rush to crack down on these domestic communities, swept up international communications on an enormous and unprecedented scale. Laperruque also notes that internal U.S. communications were surveilled, as were internet metadata.
When eventually disclosed, this surveillance troubled and infuriated people across the political spectrum, some who cared about ending racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims, and some who generally had spent years inflaming such hatred. Many strands of society were incensed that their communications were being monitored by the government. Yet those with history in U.S.-based Global South liberation movements who were targeted by programs like Nixon’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) or those whose ancestors were killed via collaborations between the KKK and the FBI knew all too well that the Constitution was meant to protect white supremacy rather than protecting us all. At the same time, the Patriot Act truly alarmed liberals and radicals alike in its potential to perpetrate a massive expansion in policing, surveillance and repression.
The George W. Bush administration had effectively circumvented the Fourth Amendment with its protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
Attempts to override the entirely bankrupt legislative action of the USA Freedom Act of 2015, was a consequence less out of concern over targeting Muslims and Arabs than anger over the widespread sweeping up of so much information about U.S. citizens — read: white people.
I lived through these past 20 years between communities in California, Illinois and Michigan. The fear was real. While working-class Arab Muslim immigrant men over the age of 16 were forced to register at their local Immigration and Naturalization Service office as part of the NSEERS program, their loved ones stood outside wondering if they would ever see them again.
The reports of violence against Arabs and Muslims — and those perceived to belong to those categories — were terrifyingly routine. Some stories reached the mainstream media; most circulated simply through word of mouth.
Now, in 2021, following the defeat of former President Donald Trump and his open promotion of anti-Muslim policies, we are witnessing the culmination of efforts led by Muslims and Arabs in the U.S. to build community-based power beyond the psychological and emotional incarceration endured between the Bush and Trump years.
The Arab Resource & Organizing Centerin California’s Bay Area along with the Arab American Action Network in Chicago have for years fought back in coalition to support anti-imperialist and abolitionist principles. Left-leaning Arab and Muslim movements are affirming that just because Trump is out doesn’t mean these efforts will relent under President Joe Biden, especially not with his interventionist history and long years of support for Israeli’s colonial policies that have been killing, containing and displacing Palestinians with U.S. weaponry.
These organizations recognize that U.S. empire-building connects movements fighting anti-Black police violence, those pressing back against anti-Arab U.S. militarism and the “war on terror,” as well as groups resisting the militarization of the border and the ongoing colonization of Native land.
The recent news out of Virginia Beach of an ongoing racist attack on a Black family’s home with “music blaring racial slurs and monkey sounds as strobe lights flashed” at the house while authorities dithered sounded all-too-familiar to me. It reminded me of my own research in 2021 with the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy in the Chicago area on the status of racial justice for Arab Americans.
I had been connected to a Muslim woman who was harassed by her neighbors for three years, notwithstanding a restraining order. She told me she felt like a hostage in her own home and police were unwilling to stop the ugly attacks from neighbors coming up to the window and shouting, “F–k Arabs, f–k Muslims.” This would be followed by calls for the family to get out of the U.S.
The animosity both families have faced is painful and traumatic and stems from the same root cause — U.S. racial capitalism and empire building. But younger generations of Black people, Arabs and/or Muslims have also in the last decade recognized more than ever the necessity of conjoining our struggles against racist police violence.
This was seen most visibly in Ferguson, Missouri, but is also witnessed, for instance, in Palestinian-Black solidarity efforts across the country as young Palestinian Arab activists organize against police violence disproportionately targeting Black people, while Black activists align with the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
As the Palestinian Youth Movement said in its 2014 statement of solidarity with Ferguson: “Whether the PATRIOT ACT or COINTELPRO, the targeting and criminalization of our communities must end now.” These efforts have extended through defund the police and abolition efforts uniting both communities.
Shortly after 9/11, I remember the national coalitions like Racial Justice 9/11 that grew overnight when tens of social movements affirmed their unity in the face of the expanding powers of the U.S. nation-state. Today, similar coalitions are inspired by the shared concern over the ways U.S. counterinsurgency tactics that repress movements have expanded, violently justifying the repression of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC)-led groups like the Movement for Black Lives.
When the Bush administration consolidated its internal war on Arabs and Muslims with the Patriot Act, it helped show Trump the power to move a portion of the U.S. public toward increasingly outward-facing white supremacy. Yet it also set in motion new coalitions. These coalitions have urgently grown out of the imperialist and racist policies implemented first by President George W. Bush, and then even more openly by Trump.
I wouldn’t wish those first traumatic months in 2001-2002 on anyone. Yet the solidarity resulting at least in part from the overreach and unconstitutional nature of the Patriot Act, followed by the racism of the Trump administration, gives me a measure of hope.
For all Trump’s efforts to roll back previous social movement wins, many breakthroughs came out of his 2016 presidential victory. More and more grassroots mutual aid movements have materialized, affirming the necessity of growing practices of collective love and reciprocity as alternatives to state violence. Two Muslim women, one Palestinian and one North African, entered the U.S. Congress in 2019 in Palestinian American Rashida Tlaib and Somali American Ilhan Omar. They were joined earlier this year by Rep. Cori Bush, who was active in the Ferguson demonstrations and has openly spoken of solidarity between Black Americans and Palestinians.
In the midst of the Israeli onslaught against Gaza this past May, Representative Bush tweeted: “The fight for Black lives and the fight for Palestinian liberation are interconnected.” She added: “We oppose our money going to fund militarized policing, occupation, and systems of violent oppression and trauma.” Tellingly, she spoke of being anti-apartheid.
Their voices in the halls of Congress are unprecedented. The effort to undermine them is intense. Yet we must remember that the long U.S.-led war on terror is an extension of the U.S.’s colonial, expansionist and racial capitalist project, rather than an exception. We cannot get stuck in celebratory hope after the defeat of Trump. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were not only complicit in the war on terror but also helped expand it.
As Kali Akuno, Brian Drolet and Doug Norberg posted on Facebook on October 27, in their critique of efforts to “save democracy,” this stance is not “an argument to avoid or ignore fighting the further advance of fascistic authoritarianism. It is a critique of a view that restricts people to fighting against certain variants of capitalist governance to the exclusion of fighting against the capitalist system itself.”
If anyone recognizes that President Biden does little to help the U.S. achieve democracy, equality or diversity, it’s my Arab immigrant community. Further, there is no sign of social transformation with Trump continuing to loom on the 2024 horizon and racist provocateurs continuing to organize and contest the 2020 election of a centrist candidate. This is why we need to be willing to imagine a radically alternative future.
Twenty years ago, I remember Arab activists like Rana Elmir demanding an end to the Patriot Act. Forced to reckon with it, they understood its potentially dangerous future. They shouted at protests that it not only expands the containment, repression, and profiling of Arabs and Muslims, but could also massively expand the U.S.’s power to repress all progressive and BIPOC communities.
So here we are. Nicole Nguyen, expert on surveillance and the war on terror, reminds us that by expanding the concept of the “violent extremist” the United States has repressed resistance against the war on terror and resistance against the police.
In the face of this repression, we have no choice but to expand our practices of solidarity, creating hope through the convergence of shared struggles for liberation rooted in collective BIPOC traditions of care, nurturing relations with the land and each other, and in commitments to horizontal, non-hierarchical self-determination.
The Chicago Reporter—Twenty years to the month after the US Congress passed the Patriot Act, Arab Americans continue to feel its devastating impact. The Patriot Act, and its successor, the USA Freedom Act, are backronyms that are Orwellian in their spin.
The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA Patriot) Act of 2001 and the Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring (USA Freedom) Act of 2015 have, in fact, intimidated and oppressed Arab and Muslim Americans while justifying an escalation of state violence against people of color rather than “strengthening” the US or “fulfilling rights.” Even today, years later, the surveillance authorized by the US Congress enables profound intrusions into the lives of citizens and non-citizens.
Just last year, Senator Ron Wyden in voting against the latest surveillance bill, warnedthat “the legislation hands the government power for warrantless collection of Americans’ web browsing and internet searches, as well as other private information, without having to demonstrate that those Americans have done anything wrong, or even were in contact with anyone suspected of wrongdoing.”
Yes, some of the worst excesses have been walked back since 2001, but invasive civil liberties violations persist. And the consequences of government intimidation continue to course through Arab, Muslim, and many more BIPOC communities. The legislation produced a culture of fear for anyone and everyone who might be perceived to be Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern, or South Asian. This fear was exacerbated during the four years with Donald Trump at the helm when demagogues promoting racist rhetoric and hate were effectively hailed and perpetrators of white supremacist violence were too often not held accountable. While this is certainly not new within the long history of US colonial and racial violence and racially motivated scapegoating, it was on steroids under Trump when such violence was more openly expressed than had been the case in recent years.
After 9/11, communities targeted by the Patriot Act, especially their working-class, recent immigrant or refugee members, have faced a form of psychological and emotional incarceration that operates through the debilitating fear caused by the sense that at any moment they may be picked up, detained, deported or tortured in a place like Guantánamo Bay. Injury or death by hate crime was a serious concern.
As 135 civil rights organizations pointed out earlier this year, treating these groups as a threat to US national security has led to “over-policing of these communities, including intrusions into community centers, mosques and almost every aspect of their lives.” The anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism promoted by the Patriot Act and more recently by the Trump administration has real-life consequences. A research study I am co-leading for the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at UIC on the Status of Racial Justice for Arab Americans reveals that racist trends in our society continue to blame Arab immigrants and Arab Americans for the attacks of 9/11 and treat them with suspicion and hatred in everyday life.
In the Chicago area alone, I have seen the fallout of these policies and the intimidation that results. The FBI showed up at a Palestinian woman’s home for daring to send humanitarian aid to Palestine. She isn’t responsible for 9/11 but was treated as though she was complicit.
In 2016, Roula Allouch in her capacity as chairwoman of the national board of directors of the Council on American-Islamic Relations addressed for The New York Times the difficulties of what has come to be known as Flying While Muslim. She noted that an increasing number of people are being deplaned for being Muslim and individuals are being removed for speaking Arabic.
20 years later, the ripple effects of the war on terror and the USA Patriot Act have inspired Arab, Muslim, Black, and other BIPOC social justice movements to grow alliances around concerns that are now frequently framed as both anti-imperialist/anti-war and abolitionist. Over the past few years, we have seen a rise in coalitional movements focused on resisting the application of “counter-terrorism” policies intended to smear, police, and surveil U.S.-based Black resistance movements. Consider the U.S.’ creation of the idea of “Black identity extremism” — a term that has reportedly been abandoned in favor of “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism.” Policymakers tend to imply that such classifications help stop white nationalist violence. Yet the FBI intentionally relies on such categories to target BIPOC movements. In cases when the “war on terror” has been used to criminalize Black activists, U.S. administrations have conflated “terrorism” with Black-led resistance against police violence as a strategy for surveillance and criminalization. The coalitions arising in response to the U.S.’ scapegoating of Black and Arab communities as “threats” to the U.S. nation-state were perhaps most dramatically seen in Ferguson, Missouri. Following Ferguson, the FBI used sophisticated surveillance aircraft technologies to police BLM protests after the killing of Freddie Gray in 2018 and has continued to do so. Local joint terrorism taskforces have also visited activists from the Movement for Black Lives, blaming them for “inciting violence.”
The convergence of the U.S.’ repression of Arab, Palestinian, Muslim, and Black movements (and groups that defy these categories such as Black Arab activists) haveprofound implications for the direction and widening of anti-war and abolitionist movements. They have also opened up new possibilities for growing U.S.-based supportfor Palestinian liberation.
As Congresswoman Cori Bush tweeted: “The fight for Black lives and the fight for Palestinian liberation are interconnected.”
Indeed, the legacies of U.S. settler-colonialism, racial capitalism, and expansion inspire ever-changing coalitions — like the solidarity Japanese Americans enacted with Arab and Muslim Americans after 9/11 and the Patriot Act.
For all the pain of the past 20 years, I take hope that more and more social movements will continue to transcend single-issue organizing. As movements like the Dissenters, the Palestinian Feminist Collective, and the Movement for Black Lives have shown us, we cannot abolish policing without abolishing the war on terror.
The idea that anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism started after September 11, 2001, is one thing many progressives get wrong. At least since the late 1970s, the U.S. government has been racially profiling Arab immigrant activists through surveillance and the corporate media has been portraying Arabs assavage misogynists.
This racial profiling continued through the Clinton administration with the Omnibus Counterterrorism Bill of 1995. The bill, supported by then Senator Joe Biden, enabled the new McCarthyism that many people contend started after 9/11. It allowed the government to use secret evidence in deportation proceedings for “aliens.” Consequently, the government could hide the source of information used to deport someone. Arab Muslim immigrant men were the primary population targeted by such secret evidence. Also, President Clinton’s executive order froze the assets of extremist groups—nearly all were Muslim or Arab.
Since then, we have witnessed the horrific post-9/11 backlash that devastated Arab and Muslim American life with hate crimes, government surveillance, FBI raids, interrogation, arrests, detentions, due process violations, and airport policing. The Trump administration then ramped up government attacks on people perceived to be Muslim through the Muslim Ban and the unleashing of the most egregious levels of hatred resulting in killings and hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims in the U.S.
Also during the Trump era, a growing solidarity movement supporting Arab and Muslim immigrant communities stepped up to demand an end to the imperial war on terror, the Muslim Ban, and the widespread hatred and violence.
Yet now that Joe Biden is in office, I wonder if the urgency of ending anti-Arab and anti-Muslim imperialist racism is dwindling. Perhaps Biden’s rhetoric about supporting Muslims — despite the racism that is baked into the national security policies he supports — has convinced people of this.
The research I am co-leading with the Arab American community in Chicago and the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at UIC, however, tells a different story. The Anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism that has been justifying and reinforcing U.S.-led war for decades remains highly devastating–and alarming.
Many people seem to forget that state-based racism in policy and government and media rhetoric trickles down into neighborhoods and institutions like hospitals, schools, policing, airports, and public space. These everyday forms of racism disproportionately permeate the everyday lives of working class recent Arab Muslim immigrants. Today, this trickle-down effect is not getting any better.
During the period of our research, we learned about an Arab Muslim whose peers at school emptied out their backpack and scribbled “terrorist” all over it.” They transferred schools after such aggressive experiences.
A suburban woman told us she was harassed by her neighbors who say “F Arabs, F Muslims” and “Get out of the United States” for the last three years. She said she felt like a hostage in her own apartment and fears leaving her teenagers home alone.
A young woman told us that while she was out eating dinner with her family, a car zoomed by and passengers screamed “terrorists.”
Some families with members who wear the hijab regularly experience incidents where after they sit down at a public place like a park, another family sitting next to them packs up and moves to another location away from them.
These may appear as individual examples and across society. People are often quick to explain perpetrators of these hateful acts as merely a few “bad apples.”
Yet I believe they result from social cues people, and particularly young people, take from political figures, policy makers, and news sources such as Fox News. Even President Barack Obama was a target. If the president of the United States could be targeted with such racism by Trump and others, it’s no wonder that Arab and Muslim youth and families are too.
During the 2008 presidential campaign Senator John McCain was frequently given false credit for correcting a woman who attempted to vilify Obama as “an Arab.” McCain said, “No ma’am, no ma’am, he’s a decent family man, citizen,” leaving the impression that if Obama was an Arab American he couldn’t be a good person or even a citizen. Of course, once in office Obama drone-bombed civilians, kept Guantanamo open, and deported millions of Black and brown people.
Then, for four years with Trump at the helm, we had state policies intentionally discriminating against Muslims, Arabs and other groups, particularly immigrants trying to cross the US southern border. These policies don’t just flip off with a change in administration. ICE agents giddy with the power of deporting people don’t just suddenly become non-racists with a change from Trump to Biden. Nor will school bullies change overnight. Imperialist, racist systems don’t just change with a new person at the top and, in fact, Biden has shown himself to be in no hurry to reverse Trump-era imperial racism from Palestine to the southern border.
We are at the beginning of a long process of undoing not just the last four years, or even centuries of U.S. history, but also the U.S. empire and its colonizing racist capitalist nature. Already the backlash has begun against teaching even the history of racism in the U.S. as somehow discriminatory against white students.
This week should be a time to reflect on how politicians took the country in dangerous directions after 9/11, both in imperialist wars abroad and at home with racist, misogynist patriotic rhetoric too frequently stoked with painful ramifications for Arab and Muslim immigrants and their children–including many who are here because the U.S. went to war “over there”– simply trying to live their lives.
In the short week since Kabul fell to the Taliban, the U.S. corporate media — and those who uncritically buy into it — are once again beating the drum that calls upon Western heroes to save Afghan women from Islamist extremism. While a New York Times headline reads, “Desperate Afghan Women Wait for U.S. Protection,” CNN sensationalizes the issue with shocking stories of the Taliban killing women.
As these media stories trickled down into daily life, a teacher in my neighborhood texted me asking where she can donate funds to help Afghan women. Feminist groups are teaching people how to “save Afghan women.” To be sure, the Taliban are exceptionally violent when it comes to gender justice and women’s rights and fundraising could indeed be helpful. Yet more than ever before, our society must shift the focus of our apparently “feminist” concerns.
Where have these concerned voices been for the past two decades while the U.S. empire has been bombing Afghan women and devastating their lives? Where were these voices even prior to 2001 when the U.S. was funding the violence in Afghanistan?
Many of the people jumping on the “saving Afghan women” bandwagon have remained silent on the rampant problem of sexual abuse across U.S. society. Perhaps the drive to “save” is driven more by a liberal humanitarian imperialist stance that ultimately reinforces U.S. superiority rather than a feminist stance truly committed to ending gender violence. Indeed, it’s easier, and probably even feels better, to focus on gender violence in stereotypical “Muslim” contexts “far away” than to consider the root causes of women’s oppression in one’s own backyard or how violence abroad has its roots, in part, in U.S. policy.
Yet we need to address the Taliban’s promotion of gender violence in ways that do not ignore, as news media typically do, the Rambo-like U.S. complicity from which this violence emerged.
Those responsible for the new wave of violent conservative gender abuses are in power because the U.S. armed and trained them. This reality was fully covered up in 2001, when the Bush administration and liberals and conservatives alike joined the choir of support for a war that was promoted to help“liberate women.” Now, that choir has re-emerged as if it is only U.S. troops that can save Afghan women. The code of silence in the corporate media on the U.S.’ role in propping up Afghan warlords must come to an end.
While a dominant idea circulating in the U.S. now blames the withdrawal of U.S. troops for the devastation of Afghan women’s rights, the U.S. military has a terrible record of sexual violence within its ranks while simultaneously killing women and children at alarming rates with aerial bombardments in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Where are those news stories?
In 2011, a Department of Defense estimate affirmed 22,800 violent sex crimes in the U.S. military. Some 20,500 service members were sexually assaulted in 2018 not by a “few bad apples” but by an institution rooted and founded upon sexualized violence. According to the film Invisible War, 20 percent of all active-duty female soldiers are assaulted and 33 percent of survivors do not report assault because they must report to a friend of their rapist — if not the rapist himself — and they fear retaliation.
The corporate media’s coverage of gender violence and Afghanistan also conveniently ignores the U.S. soldiers who have raped or assaulted Afghan women and girls; the U.S.’ rampant killings and torture in Afghanistan; the U.S.’ refusal to prosecute while blocking International Criminal Court investigations into U.S.-led torture and abuse; and the many detainees who have been tortured, abused, and/or sexually assaulted in Afghanistan by the CIA. We must stop expecting that an institution, and an empire, rooted in sexual violence and torture will help end sexual violence and abuses abroad and we must hold U.S. militarism accountable.
U.S. leaders call for an end to sexualized violence in Afghanistan only when it benefits U.S. policy. It is no secret that the Obama and Bush administrations forced U.S. soldiers to remain silent on — and avoid reporting on — child sexual abuse in Afghanistan when it was practiced by their allies in the Afghan police and militia they trained. The same leaders who allegedly fought to “save the women” from the Taliban enabled allies to sexually abuse children.
Overall, the bombing of hospitals, massive civilian casualties, deadly landmines, poverty, malnutrition, lack of sanitation, inaccessible health care, and environmental destruction disproportionately devastate women. As the primary community-based caretakers, women carry these tragedies on their shoulders.
As an Arab woman whose region of the world has been divided and destroyed by U.S.-led wars, I am offended by hypocritical feminist advocates who call for ending gender violence only when it aligns with U.S. military agendas. These advocates should adopt a more consistent feminist politics.
They could challenge the imperialist notion that the U.S. is the world’s leader and savior in the struggle to end gender violence. Rather than striving to “save Afghan women,” they could acknowledge their own privileged position in relation to Afghanistan including what their own tax-dollars have been funding. They could call for an end to U.S.-led militarism and the racist-sexist violence it wreaks upon the world. They could demand an end to sexual violence enacted by the U.S. state–in the military, on the streets, in prisons and jails, in detention centers, upon the bodies of indigenous women, and in the courtroom. They could also challenge the U.S.’ funding of leaders who have promoted gender injustices—in Egypt, Israel, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and beyond.
As the movement I have been involved in, INCITE!, said shortly after the U.S. launched its war on Afghanistan in the name of “saving women” in 2001, “wars have never liberated women of color and third world women.” The travesty of Afghanistan affirms this reality more than ever before.
Yet again, we are learning that U.S. imperialism was never meant to “help.” It was meant to divide, conquer, and destroy. The U.S. spent hundreds of billions of dollars in Afghanistan and yet is departing in many ways more devastated than before 2001. This is a failure not just to recognize the limits of US military power, but a failure to recognize the inherent violence and cruelty of imperialism – feminist imperialism or otherwise — and the certainty that it will elicit a strong pushback.
On July 20, millions of Muslims across the U.S. celebrated Eid Al Adha, the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice, commemorating Prophet Ibrahim’s faithfulness to God after being tested with the unfulfilled command to sacrifice his son. In Chicago, the Arab American Muslim families I know celebrated with feasts, prayers, and giving. They shared and distributed food with those in need. They visited cemeteries to share the celebration in the memory of departed loved ones. They drove across town or to nearby states like Michigan to celebrate with their extended family. Community organizations mobilized to support their constituents.
SANAD Food Pantry organized feast day, a block party providing hot meals to community members.. Arab American Family Services’ “adopt a family” project brought new clothes, shoes and toys to many immigrant families.
More and more, the dominant U.S. society has attempted to include holidays like this in U.S. diversity efforts. For example, New York Public Schools recognize it as a holiday. Annual news articles educate the public about the holiday’s history and meaning.
Yet while those who are not part of the Arab American Muslim community are increasingly acknowledging the joy and the family and community bonding Eid Al Adha encapsulates, less attention is being paid to the painful gaps and absences in many of the celebrating families. Especially today, many Muslim American families are incomplete because of the compounded effects of war and displacement, the COVID-19 pandemic, and U.S. immigration bans, all of which obstruct efforts to make loving families and communities whole.
Consider, for example, Chicago’s relatively large number of Syrian, Yemeni, and Palestinian communities. Many Yemeni families have been separated from one another due to the lasting effectsof the Muslim Ban coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Yemen. Many individuals impacted by the Muslim Ban are still stuck in limbo, even though President Joe Biden reversed the ban. For them, family separation means the mental anguish that comes with family members stranded abroad or grown children living without their parents.
For Syrian refugees, including 13.5 million internationally displaced of which approximately 4 million are children, family separation has produced profound psychological, social, and economic tragedies. In one case, one group of siblings was scattered across six countries. While limited data exist on family separation in Chicago, family separation for Syrian refugees generally leads to significant stress from the loss of loved ones, fear for the safety of one’s family members in Syria, massive health and financial consequences, and immigration-related complications.
In my interactions with immigrants and refugees at Middle East Immigration and Refugee Alliance and the Arab American Action Network, I have met many Iraqis who are in the U.S. alone, unable to reunite with loved ones due to displacement produced by the U.S.-led war and the injustices of the U.S. immigration system. I also know Chicago-based Egyptians who cannot return to Egypt as a result of the U.S.-backed Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi regime’s attack on activists in exile (and their loved ones who are still in Egypt) who participated in the Arab Spring revolution of 2011.
Chicago is home to one of the largest Palestinian communities in the U.S. In my capacity as interim director of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a study I am directing, the State of Racial Justice for Arab Americans, shows that many come from villages that have been destroyed by Israeli policies of land confiscation. Some remaining villages have more members living in Chicago than in the village of origin.
Israel’s denial of Palestinian refugees right to return under international law exacerbates these struggles. As we saw when Israel barred U.S. congresswoman Rashida Tlaib from entering Israel, Israel’s barring of Palestinian Americans from entering Palestine and Israel and the humiliation they endure at Israeli borders leaves their loved ones on edge when they are traveling to their Palestinian homeland for holidays, leisure, or work.
In 2018, Rasmea Odeh, a beloved Palestinian Chicagoan and community leader was deported by U.S. immigration authorities as a strategy to repress Palestinian American activism. I can only imagine the pain her family and friends in Chicago experienced when they could not celebrate this past Eid Al Adha with her.
Arab American Muslims do not need shallow gestures of inclusion and diversity that celebrate the community as if it is a static stereotype that exists outside of history like the numerous news reports that do nothing more than explain “What Muslims Eat during Eid” or “How Muslims celebrate Eid Al Adha.” These shallow gestures are no different than a Hallmark-like happy holidays shout out or a multicultural melting pot that celebrates cultural and religious difference but refuses to take seriously the institutionalized forms of violence and racism that contribute to family and community-based experiences.
To be sure, faith and the relation between individuals and the divine are foundational to Muslim identity. Yet Arab American Muslims, like any community, celebrate their holidays in real time, within the historical and political realities of our times.
How about we get to know who our Arab American Muslim community really is and the pains and joys of their family celebrations?
We need to honor peoples’ realities and the joys and struggles that make up their holiday celebrations.
While recognizing Eid Al Adha, how about we also stand up and put pressure on the Biden administration when it comes to border control restrictions and the war on terror that prevent family reunification.
Likewise, more organizing is needed to challenge the U.S. corporations dominating COVID-19 vaccines globally with their hierarchy of importance determining who will live and die and what countries will be left bereft to suffer not just sanctions but the full ravages of COVID-19. Ending U.S.-led wars against predominantly Muslim countries and addressing profound failings in our immigration system would help enable Chicago’s Arab American Muslims to celebrate the next Eid Al Adha with, and not apart from, their loved ones.
Earlier this summer, several news outlets reported that the Palestinian American Community Center (PACC) in New Jersey, where Palestinian Americans gather for community organizing, civic engagement and humanitarian relief efforts was “bombarded with threats for 7 hours.” Yet perhaps due to the patriarchal culture underlying the U.S. media, the news reporters did not give much focus to the highly gendered and sexualized nature of these threats, which were laced with language about sexual violence and rape:
Caller: “Is this the terrorist community center?”
Caller: “I’m going to come rape you and give you a taste of your own medicine.”
The sexualized nature of these threats was just one recent example of how the Israeli state and its supporters across the globe often rely upon sexism and homophobia to further the project of Israeli settler-colonialism.
Indeed, the Israeli state’s reliance on the gendered and sexualized targeting of Palestinian bodies is an essential component of colonization that disproportionately devastates the lives of women and LGBTQ people and obstructs the possibilities of mothering, caretaking and relationship-building.
As Israeli settler-colonialism finds its perfect ally in U.S. settler-colonialism, U.S.-based advocates of Israel have been reifying this pattern for decades by consistently bullying Palestinian community leaders and activists, and threatening them (not only women) with rapeand sexual assault. The recent attack on Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) member Rasha Mubarak, president of Unbought Power, is but one example of how this repression strategy especially targets women organizers. After she co-led an effort demanding that Florida state legislators condemn Israeli violence and support free speech on Palestine, pro-Israel advocates accused her of being an “Islamist” who targets “Jews and Gays.”
Whether real or threat, sexualized violence invoked in service of the Israeli state furthers one of the foundations of settler-colonialism — dominating and controlling Palestinian people, which necessitates the violation of Palestinian women’s bodies. A patriarchal logic and its heteronormative gender binary drives the necessity of these colonial violations while reducing women to mere bearers of future generations and therefore, those responsible for reproducing Palestine.
Consider the massacre of Deir Yassin village, a central moment in the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians from their villages during the Nakba of 1948, an event Palestinians and Arabs insist that “we will never forget” and that right-wing supporters of Israel deny ever happened. Recounting her experience when Zionist fighters went house to house with submachine guns, Fahimeh Ali Mustafa Zeidan later recalled:
[They] took us out one by one. They shot the son-in-law, and when one of his daughters screamed, they shot her too. They then called my brother Mahmoud and shot him in our presence, and when my mother screamed and bent over my brother, carrying my little sister Khadra, who was still being breast-fed, they shot my mother too…. They then lined us up, shot at us, and left.
Many Palestinian testimonies of the events surrounding the creation of the state of Israel involve memories of rape and sexual assault, even as Israel’s literal and metaphorical targeting of Palestinian women’s bodies continues 73 years later.
Banner image for Palestinian Feminist Collective.COURTESY OF PALESTINIAN FEMINIST COLLECTIVE
For instance, Palestinian Feminist Collective member Nada Elia has documented Israeli military intelligence officer Mordechai Kedar suggesting that the only thing that would deter attacks by a Hamas militant “is knowing that if caught, his sister or his mother would be raped.” She also reminds us of Israeli Minister of Interior Ayelet Shaked who openly called for the murder of Palestinian women because they give birth to “little snakes.”
Just as white supremacist forces in the U.S. scapegoat Black mothers in an attempt to avert attention from the state’s racist criminalization of Black men, Israeli state officials and media scapegoat Palestinian mothers,describing them as “terrorist supporters” who would prioritize throwing their children out into the streets to die over loving and protecting them.
Elia adds that such comments reflect an Israeli infrastructure designed to sustain high rates of miscarriages by blocking basic resources such as water and medical supplies, and generally creating inhumane and unlivable conditions for Palestinians. For supporters of Israeli settler-colonialism, controlling Palestinian reproduction is essential to maintaining a Jewish majority on Palestinian land.
This is why, as Rhoda Kanaaneh, pioneer of Palestinian reproductive justice feminism, has established, Israeli state policies encourage Jewish Israelis to reproduce while discouraging Palestinian Israelis from having children. This also explains why Souzan Naser and the collective we co-lead, MAMAS, have been demanding that Palestinian liberation is a reproductive justice issue.
Palestinian political prisoners (meaning all Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli jails), despite their gender identity, face the threat and reality of systemic sexual violence and torture. Paralleling the homophobic and sexist imperialist strategy that U.S. soldiers used in the Abu-Ghraib torture scandal in Iraq, the Israeli state targets political prisoners using the racist assumptions that Arab culture is “hyper-misogynist” and rooted in apparently backwards or “savage” concepts of family honor and shame. In one well-established pattern, Israeli soldiers threaten Palestinian detainees that they will bring in a family member to watch the soldiers sexually assault them or punish them by sexually assaulting their family member.
Cover image for Palestinian Feminist Collective’s “Freedom Within Reach” Palestine Action Toolkit.
This colonialist and imperialist strategy is driven by the racist idea that sexualized punishment is a “special” way to punish people from the Arab region. As this colonialist-racist logic goes, since the many people often lumped together as “Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims” are considered “exceptionally sexist,” sexual violence is deemed especially appalling to them. Of course, as organizerTrishala Deb asks in their analysis of U.S. soldiers who used a similar logic against Iraqi war prisoners, for which culture would these acts of sexual assault, rape and murder be less appalling?
To be sure, Elham Bayour and Lena Meari remind us that such strategies aim to scare Palestinians from participating in resistance against Israeli colonization. Yet they also shift public attention away from U.S. and Israeli state violence and toward the apparent “sexual savagery” or “backwardness” of Palestinians and Arabs.
Pinkwashing is a related strategy that Israel deploys to distract attention away from its oppression of Palestinians in the face of a growing international Palestinian solidarity movement. AlQaws activists, centering the experiences of queer Palestinians, describe pinkwashing as an international propaganda effort that aims to rebrand Israel as a liberated “modern” and therefore “gay-friendly” state compared with what it portrays as hyper-homophobic “Palestinian-Arab-Muslim culture.”
AlQaws reminds us that pinkwashing not only serves to justify settler-colonialism (i.e. “savage” homophobic Palestinians need to be dominated and civilized by modern, progressive, gay-friendly Israelis) but it also divides Palestinians. For instance, it alienates queer Palestinians by defining Palestinian sexual diversity as non-existent or unnatural.
Exposing the impact of these strategies on Palestinian communities, Sarah Ihmoud says Israel’s targeting of Palestinian women’s bodies generates patriarchy among Palestinians, leading to shifts in power relations within families and communities. For example, some family members, concerned about the threat of sexual assault, might wittingly or unwittingly strengthen patriarchal currents by understandably steering daughters away from political activism.
Just as colonialist U.S. policies forced Indigenous children to separate from their parents and attacked the rights of Indigenous mothers, many Palestinians are denied the possibility of mothering, protecting their loved ones, and reveling in the joy of relations, togetherness and community building. In the West Bank and Gaza, the hundreds of Israeli check points and roadblocks that restrict Palestinian movement are a crucial site of violence against Palestinian women’s bodies. There, women in labor are denied or delayed from reaching hospitals and forced to give birth at checkpoints, resulting in miscarriages and death.
There are many other ways in which Israeli colonization is constituted by a systematic attack on Palestinian mothering and caregiving, as well, including Israeli soldiers’ raids of Palestinian homes are often accompanied by sexual harassment of mothers and daughters. Israel’s systematic shooting of children with impunity, its longstanding enforcement of family separation among Palestinians, and the devastating impact of ongoing massacres and killings on rising rates of miscarriages and still births.
In the face of these atrocities, since the beginning of the 20th century, when European Jews began migrating as part of the colonization of Palestine (before the state of Israel was established in 1948), Palestinian women have been forging unapologetic visions and movements of resistance. Eileen Kuttab’s mapping of these movements teaches us that the period of the 1920s-1947 entailed a distinct feminist national liberation agenda; 1948-1967 involved resistance and mutual aid work in the face of the massive destruction and fragmentation resulting from the creation of the state of Israel; 1967-1976 involved sustaining society in the face of intensified pressures and a growing resistance movement; and 1976-1981 inspired women’s mass-based organizations that organized and mobilized women in villages and refugee camps using national as well as women’s issues as frameworks for their work, extending and growing throughout the first intifada [uprising] of 1987-1991.
The massive escalation of Israeli violence during the second intifada of 2000 weakened women’s movements, and the next decade witnessed what Manal Jamal calls “western promoted gender empowerment” that “undermined the cohesiveness of the women’s movement” and disempowered the grassroots.
In the U.S., Palestinian and Arab feminists have been forced to contend with Zionism and racism within the U.S. women’s movement all along, including the consistent exclusion and repression of Palestinian feminist perspectives within activist communities that many refer to as “progressive except for Palestine.”
As Lila Sharif of the Palestinian Feminist Collective puts it,
Mainstream feminism has omitted a critique of Zionism and reified the racist idea that “Arab culture” is solely responsible for the repression and oppression of Palestinian women.
This explains why, in 2001, the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, San Francisco (AWSA SF) Chapter published the paper, “The Forgotten ’ism: An Arab American Feminist Critique of Zionism, Racism, and Sexism” as part of the Oakland, California-based Women of Color Resource Center’splatform at the World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa. Our intervention was a follow-up to Betty Friedan’s silencing of Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi at the 1985 UN conference on the status of women in Nairobi, Kenya, when she criticized Israel. Many Arab Women’s Solidarity Association SF members went on to join INCITE! Women and Gender Non-Conforming People of Color against Violence as INCITE! committed to its Palestine Points of Unity, including solidarity with the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees and divestment from Israel in the early 2000s.
These realities speak to why Palestinian and Arab feminists have built alliances primarily in radical Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) feminist spaces. Palestinian alliances within U.S. BIPOC feminist movements have their roots in the period of the first intifada of the 1980s. At the time, the Union of Palestinian Women’s Association (UPWA) allied with members of the Third World Women’s Alliance, which came out of the feminist impulse within the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In an interview, Camille Odeh, national director of the UPWA told me:
Founded in 1986 and disbanded in the early 1990s, the UPWA was practicing intersectionality before the term was coined in academia. We forged solidarity with feminist movements representing Central America, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, South Africa, many countries in the Arab region, and the U.S., [to form] the UPWA. Holding panels on sexuality, the UPWA was ahead of its time, and we connected the grassroots, working class with academics–all sitting at the table doing popular education work.
Today, we are witnessing the continuation of these legacies through the unified Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC), which was founded in 2021 and is based in the U.S. The Palestinian Feminist Collective’s founding pledge invites allies to embrace Palestinian liberation as essential to feminist struggle. As Sarah Ihmoud states, the pledge exposes the alliance between many strands of U.S. feminism and Israel; honors the feminist traditions that have come before us; affirms the visible and invisible ways Palestinian women have been resisting and envisioning a different future; and insists on the inseparability of gender and queer emancipation and decolonization.
The Palestinian Feminist Collective’s extensive toolkit provides a step-by-step guide for allies committed to solidarity with Palestinian liberation. According to Loubna Qatami, the collective continues the legacy of historical Palestinian women’s movements, affirms the unity of Palestinian peoplehood across borders; and validates a coalitional politics with Black, Indigenous and all global freedom struggles.
Today’s U.S.-based Palestinian feminist movement is anti-colonial in its resistance and decolonial in its insistence on what Leena Odeh explains as “re-discover[ing] a new sense of belonging — to us, to each other, to the earth … and plant[ing] seeds of values centered liberation, healing and steadfastness in all of our communities so that we can reclaim our wholeness.”
In an interview with Truthout, Lila Sharif explained this dual vision:
With the most recent Israeli violence in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Feminist Collective finds creative ways to sustain ourselves and each other. Publicly, we take up digital spaces to center Palestine as a feminist issue; ally with Black, Indigenous and transnational feminist movements; lead workshops; and speak on radio, TV and across the U.S. to support our sisters in Gaza and across Palestine. Our decolonial component encourages carrying each other through collective grief. We uphold, celebrate, learn from and continue the work of Palestinian (and Arab) women who have sustained life. Their practices have included writing, teaching, caregiving, organizing, revolting, transmitting history, and others that call out, resist, and defy settler colonialism, military violence, racism, patriarchy, white supremacy, homophobia and capitalist exploitation. We also recognize how Palestinian women sustain joy and pleasure through singing, dancing, preparing and sharing food, storytelling, poetic expression, praying, planting and harvesting. We see Palestinian feminist praxis rooted in decolonial aspirations in Palestine and beyond, thereby radically transforming mainstream feminism.
Through collective healing and mobilizing, building and fighting, our Palestinian and Arab feminist movements exist to resist. Activism is not a choice. It is survival. As we carry the blood of our people in our hearts, we will continue to rise up out of love for our land, our histories, and one another far beyond freedom, and we will continue to grow, from the ashes of every Israeli assault, “roses from thorns.”
Earlier this summer, several news outlets reported that the Palestinian American Community Center (PACC) in New Jersey, where Palestinian Americans gather for community organizing, civic engagement and humanitarian relief efforts was “bombarded with threats for 7 hours.” Yet perhaps due to the patriarchal culture underlying the U.S. media, the news reporters did not give much focus to the highly gendered and sexualized nature of these threats, which were laced with language about sexual violence and rape:
Caller: “Is this the terrorist community center?”
Caller: “I’m going to come rape you and give you a taste of your own medicine.”
The sexualized nature of these threats was just one recent example of how the Israeli state and its supporters across the globe often rely upon sexism and homophobia to further the project of Israeli settler-colonialism.
Indeed, the Israeli state’s reliance on the gendered and sexualized targeting of Palestinian bodies is an essential component of colonization that disproportionately devastates the lives of women and LGBTQ people and obstructs the possibilities of mothering, caretaking and relationship-building.
Yet all along, Palestinian feminists have been exposing, resisting and shaping a world beyond the hetero-patriarchal violence that is foundational to the Israeli settler-colonial project while demanding, on a global stage, that the Palestinian struggle is a feminist and a reproductive justice issue.
As Israeli settler-colonialism finds its perfect ally in U.S. settler-colonialism, U.S.-based advocates of Israel have been reifying this pattern for decades by consistently bullying Palestinian community leaders and activists, and threatening them (not only women) with rape and sexual assault. The recent attack on Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) member Rasha Mubarak, president of Unbought Power, is but one example of how this repression strategy especially targets women organizers. After she co-led an effort demanding that Florida state legislators condemn Israeli violence and support free speech on Palestine, pro-Israel advocates accused her of being an “Islamist” who targets “Jews and Gays.”
Whether real or threat, sexualized violence invoked in service of the Israeli state furthers one of the foundations of settler-colonialism — dominating and controlling Palestinian people, which necessitates the violation of Palestinian women’s bodies. A patriarchal logic and its heteronormative gender binary drives the necessity of these colonial violations while reducing women to mere bearers of future generations and therefore, those responsible for reproducing Palestine.
Consider the massacre of Deir Yassin village, a central moment in the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians from their villages during the Nakba of 1948, an event Palestinians and Arabs insist that “we will never forget” and that right-wing supporters of Israel deny ever happened. Recounting her experience when Zionist fighters went house to house with submachine guns, Fahimeh Ali Mustafa Zeidan later recalled:
[They] took us out one by one. They shot the son-in-law, and when one of his daughters screamed, they shot her too. They then called my brother Mahmoud and shot him in our presence, and when my mother screamed and bent over my brother, carrying my little sister Khadra, who was still being breast-fed, they shot my mother too…. They then lined us up, shot at us, and left.
Many Palestinian testimonies of the events surrounding the creation of the state of Israel involve memories of rape and sexual assault, even as Israel’s literal and metaphorical targeting of Palestinian women’s bodies continues 73 years later.
Banner image for Palestinian Feminist Collective. COURTESY OF PALESTINIAN FEMINIST COLLECTIVE
For instance, Palestinian Feminist Collective member Nada Elia has documented Israeli military intelligence officer Mordechai Kedar suggesting that the only thing that would deter attacks by a Hamas militant “is knowing that if caught, his sister or his mother would be raped.” She also reminds us of Israeli Minister of Interior Ayelet Shaked who openly called for the murder of Palestinian women because they give birth to “little snakes.”
Just as white supremacist forces in the U.S. scapegoat Black mothers in an attempt to avert attention from the state’s racist criminalization of Black men, Israeli state officials and media scapegoat Palestinian mothers, describing them as “terrorist supporters” who would prioritize throwing their children out into the streets to die over loving and protecting them.
Elia adds that such comments reflect an Israeli infrastructure designed to sustain high rates of miscarriages by blocking basic resources such as water and medical supplies, and generally creating inhumane and unlivable conditions for Palestinians. For supporters of Israeli settler-colonialism, controlling Palestinian reproduction is essential to maintaining a Jewish majority on Palestinian land.
This is why, as Rhoda Kanaaneh, pioneer of Palestinian reproductive justice feminism, has established, Israeli state policies encourage Jewish Israelis to reproduce while discouraging Palestinian Israelis from having children. This also explains why Souzan Naser and the collective we co-lead, MAMAS, have been demanding that Palestinian liberation is a reproductive justice issue.
Palestinian political prisoners (meaning all Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli jails), despite their gender identity, face the threat and reality of systemic sexual violence and torture. Paralleling the homophobic and sexist imperialist strategy that U.S. soldiers used in the Abu-Ghraib torture scandal in Iraq, the Israeli state targets political prisoners using the racist assumptions that Arab culture is “hyper-misogynist” and rooted in apparently backwards or “savage” concepts of family honor and shame. In one well-established pattern, Israeli soldiers threaten Palestinian detainees that they will bring in a family member to watch the soldiers sexually assault them or punish them by sexually assaulting their family member.
Cover image for Palestinian Feminist Collective’s “Freedom Within Reach” Palestine Action Toolkit. COURTESY OF PALESTINIAN FEMINIST COLLECTIVE
This colonialist and imperialist strategy is driven by the racist idea that sexualized punishment is a “special” way to punish people from the Arab region. As this colonialist-racist logic goes, since the many people often lumped together as “Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims” are considered “exceptionally sexist,” sexual violence is deemed especially appalling to them. Of course, as organizer Trishala Deb asks in their analysis of U.S. soldiers who used a similar logic against Iraqi war prisoners, for which culture would these acts of sexual assault, rape and murder be less appalling?
To be sure, Elham Bayour and Lena Meari remind us that such strategies aim to scare Palestinians from participating in resistance against Israeli colonization. Yet they also shift public attention away from U.S. and Israeli state violence and toward the apparent “sexual savagery” or “backwardness” of Palestinians and Arabs.
Pinkwashing is a related strategy that Israel deploys to distract attention away from its oppression of Palestinians in the face of a growing international Palestinian solidarity movement. AlQaws activists, centering the experiences of queer Palestinians, describe pinkwashing as an international propaganda effort that aims to rebrand Israel as a liberated “modern” and therefore “gay-friendly” state compared with what it portrays as hyper-homophobic “Palestinian-Arab-Muslim culture.”
AlQaws reminds us that pinkwashing not only serves to justify settler-colonialism (i.e. “savage” homophobic Palestinians need to be dominated and civilized by modern, progressive, gay-friendly Israelis) but it also divides Palestinians. For instance, it alienates queer Palestinians by defining Palestinian sexual diversity as non-existent or unnatural.
Exposing the impact of these strategies on Palestinian communities, Sarah Ihmoud says Israel’s targeting of Palestinian women’s bodies generates patriarchy among Palestinians, leading to shifts in power relations within families and communities. For example, some family members, concerned about the threat of sexual assault, might wittingly or unwittingly strengthen patriarchal currents by understandably steering daughters away from political activism.
Just as colonialist U.S. policies forced Indigenous children to separate from their parents and attacked the rights of Indigenous mothers, many Palestinians are denied the possibility of mothering, protecting their loved ones, and reveling in the joy of relations, togetherness and community building. In the West Bank and Gaza, the hundreds of Israeli check points and roadblocks that restrict Palestinian movement are a crucial site of violence against Palestinian women’s bodies. There, women in labor are denied or delayed from reaching hospitals and forced to give birth at checkpoints, resulting in miscarriages and death.
There are many other ways in which Israeli colonization is constituted by a systematic attack on Palestinian mothering and caregiving, as well, including Israeli soldiers’ raids of Palestinian homes are often accompanied by sexual harassment of mothers and daughters. Israel’s systematic shooting of children with impunity, its longstanding enforcement of family separation among Palestinians, and the devastating impact of ongoing massacres and killings on rising rates of miscarriages and still births.
In the face of these atrocities, since the beginning of the 20th century, when European Jews began migrating as part of the colonization of Palestine (before the state of Israel was established in 1948), Palestinian women have been forging unapologetic visions and movements of resistance. Eileen Kuttab’s mapping of these movements teaches us that the period of the 1920s-1947 entailed a distinct feminist national liberation agenda; 1948-1967 involved resistance and mutual aid work in the face of the massive destruction and fragmentation resulting from the creation of the state of Israel; 1967-1976 involved sustaining society in the face of intensified pressures and a growing resistance movement; and 1976-1981 inspired women’s mass-based organizations that organized and mobilized women in villages and refugee camps using national as well as women’s issues as frameworks for their work, extending and growing throughout the first intifada [uprising] of 1987-1991.
The massive escalation of Israeli violence during the second intifada of 2000 weakened women’s movements, and the next decade witnessed what Manal Jamal calls “western promoted gender empowerment” that “undermined the cohesiveness of the women’s movement” and disempowered the grassroots.
In the U.S., Palestinian and Arab feminists have been forced to contend with Zionism and racism within the U.S. women’s movement all along, including the consistent exclusion and repression of Palestinian feminist perspectives within activist communities that many refer to as “progressive except for Palestine.”
As Lila Sharif of the Palestinian Feminist Collective puts it,
Mainstream feminism has omitted a critique of Zionism and reified the racist idea that “Arab culture” is solely responsible for the repression and oppression of Palestinian women.
This explains why, in 2001, the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, San Francisco (AWSA SF) Chapter published the paper, “The Forgotten ’ism: An Arab American Feminist Critique of Zionism, Racism, and Sexism” as part of the Oakland, California-based Women of Color Resource Center’s platform at the World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa. Our intervention was a follow-up to Betty Friedan’s silencing of Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi at the 1985 UN conference on the status of women in Nairobi, Kenya, when she criticized Israel. Many Arab Women’s Solidarity Association SF members went on to join INCITE! Women and Gender Non-Conforming People of Color against Violence as INCITE! committed to its Palestine Points of Unity, including solidarity with the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees and divestment from Israel in the early 2000s.
These realities speak to why Palestinian and Arab feminists have built alliances primarily in radical Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) feminist spaces. Palestinian alliances within U.S. BIPOC feminist movements have their roots in the period of the first intifada of the 1980s. At the time, the Union of Palestinian Women’s Association (UPWA) allied with members of the Third World Women’s Alliance, which came out of the feminist impulse within the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In an interview, Camille Odeh, national director of the UPWA told me:
Founded in 1986 and disbanded in the early 1990s, the UPWA was practicing intersectionality before the term was coined in academia. We forged solidarity with feminist movements representing Central America, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, South Africa, many countries in the Arab region, and the U.S., [to form] the UPWA. Holding panels on sexuality, the UPWA was ahead of its time, and we connected the grassroots, working class with academics–all sitting at the table doing popular education work.
Today, we are witnessing the continuation of these legacies through the unified Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC), which was founded in 2021 and is based in the U.S. The Palestinian Feminist Collective’s founding pledge invites allies to embrace Palestinian liberation as essential to feminist struggle. As Sarah Ihmoud states, the pledge exposes the alliance between many strands of U.S. feminism and Israel; honors the feminist traditions that have come before us; affirms the visible and invisible ways Palestinian women have been resisting and envisioning a different future; and insists on the inseparability of gender and queer emancipation and decolonization.
The Palestinian Feminist Collective’s extensive toolkit provides a step-by-step guide for allies committed to solidarity with Palestinian liberation. According to Loubna Qatami, the collective continues the legacy of historical Palestinian women’s movements, affirms the unity of Palestinian peoplehood across borders; and validates a coalitional politics with Black, Indigenous and all global freedom struggles.
Today’s U.S.-based Palestinian feminist movement is anti-colonial in its resistance and decolonial in its insistence on what Leena Odeh explains as “re-discover[ing] a new sense of belonging — to us, to each other, to the earth … and plant[ing] seeds of values centered liberation, healing and steadfastness in all of our communities so that we can reclaim our wholeness.”
In an interview with Truthout, Lila Sharif explained this dual vision:
With the most recent Israeli violence in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Feminist Collective finds creative ways to sustain ourselves and each other. Publicly, we take up digital spaces to center Palestine as a feminist issue; ally with Black, Indigenous and transnational feminist movements; lead workshops; and speak on radio, TV and across the U.S. to support our sisters in Gaza and across Palestine. Our decolonial component encourages carrying each other through collective grief. We uphold, celebrate, learn from and continue the work of Palestinian (and Arab) women who have sustained life. Their practices have included writing, teaching, caregiving, organizing, revolting, transmitting history, and others that call out, resist, and defy settler colonialism, military violence, racism, patriarchy, white supremacy, homophobia and capitalist exploitation. We also recognize how Palestinian women sustain joy and pleasure through singing, dancing, preparing and sharing food, storytelling, poetic expression, praying, planting and harvesting. We see Palestinian feminist praxis rooted in decolonial aspirations in Palestine and beyond, thereby radically transforming mainstream feminism.
Through collective healing and mobilizing, building and fighting, our Palestinian and Arab feminist movements exist to resist. Activism is not a choice. It is survival. As we carry the blood of our people in our hearts, we will continue to rise up out of love for our land, our histories, and one another far beyond freedom, and we will continue to grow, from the ashes of every Israeli assault, “roses from thorns.”
For centuries, Black and Indigenous writers have established loud and clear the great paradox of the Fourth of July: the U.S.’ purported democracy was founded on slavery and genocide. We must also remember that since July 4, 1776, the U.S. has not only continued its settler-colonial project and itscontainment of Black people within U.S. borders, but it has also expanded its colonial aspirations across the globe. One only needs to recall that the turn of the 20th century “independence” entailed the colonization of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, and Hawaii.
In recent years, from police killings of Black people to the deportation machine’scaging of children, it is more clear than ever that the idea that “all men are created equal” was meant only for some, not for all. Perhaps this explains why protesting U.S. state violence has been as much of a part of the Fourth of July as the fireworks and the cookouts all along — from Congolese Therese Patricia Okomou who scaled the Statue of Liberty to protest family separations in 2018 and continues to demand “Abolish ICE” to the 2020 protests against police violence or those who blocked the highway leading up to Mount Rushmore, reminding the world that this land, the Black Hills, belongs to the Lakota Sioux.
As an Arab American, I do not celebrate independence, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on the Fourth of July when the very system claiming to hold these values is killing my people abroad and targeting us through counter-insurgency strategies as well as through surveillance and immigration bans within the U.S. I do celebrate similar principles on other days.
I’ll never forget hearing U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s voice blasting through my family’s TV screen in 1996 when she said the price of killing half of a million Iraqi children in Iraq was worth it. In my twenties, I realized that for those in power, the profit the 1% and oil industry gain from war is more important than the blood of my people. Arab children’s lives have no value to too many in the American political and economic system. My heart continued to bleed into my thirties when I watched Muhammad Al Durra on TV, picking it up from the French 2 station, killed by Israeli gunfire in his father’s arms in September 2000.
In May 2021, the hundreds of Palestinians killed and the 72,000 displaced joined in my heart the 1.6 million Iraqis who died during the decade-long U.S. occupation of Iraq. U.S.-made weapons killed them both as did the American-backed sanctions and embargoes. I see all too well how Republicans and most Democrats view my people. Newly arrived politicians such as Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, however, are voicing many of my concerns and being terribly misrepresented and vilified for doing so within the rampant anti-Muslim racism of Washington and the mainstream U.S. news media.
The elders of my family immigrated to the U.S. from Jordan in the 1950s and 60s. My father was a shopkeeper in San Francisco who changed his name from Suleiman to Sol out of fear that people would not visit his store if they knew he was an Arab. My uncle Raja went by Roger and my uncle Yacoub went by Jack at their stores. It’s painful to think back on the compromises with their identity they felt compelled to make in order to survive – in an ostensibly liberal community!
To be sure, while Israeli colonization has gravely impacted Jordan, we were not survivors of Israeli violence or a U.S.-led war. Yet I grew up in an Arab immigrant community surrounded by people I consider kin who were forced to leave their homes and lands in Iraq and Palestine only to relocate to the very nation responsible for their trauma. There were also many who came before the U.S. devastated Iraq and before the U.S. sided so overwhelmingly with Israel in its 1967 occupation of Palestinian territory. They were following previously arriving family members or came to the U.S. because they, like millions across the world, recognized the opportunities available in the world’s financial superpower, even as it took wealth and resources from some of the very places they were fleeing.
Today, in my capacity as interim director of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois, I am directing a study about Arab Americans and racial profiling. In a recent group interview with Arab immigrants and refugee women living in Chicagoland suburbs, I was reminded of how the racism of U.S. government policy can manifest itself in local form in everyday Arab American life. One mother said she cannot leave her children’s side inside her own apartment because her white supremacist neighbors consistently stand outside her children’s bedroom window and harass them, shouting that they are terrorists and demanding that they “go back home.”
So much for Ellis Island and founding myths. The reality and the mythology remain far apart. In the aftermath of the terrible four years of Donald Trump, the Biden administration is continuing programs rooted in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism such Countering Violent Extremism, a community-driven program that expands the criminalization of Muslim Americans.
This Fourth of July, I will not be watching fireworks or joining a cookout. I will be holding my two Jordanian-Egyptian sons tightly in my arms. We will discuss the meaning of freedom when those of us who criticize Israeli state violence are punished for free speech. We will discuss the meaning of independence when the settler-colonial expansionist U.S. nation-state devastates the Middle East for profit, and we will reflect on the “liberty” of the federal government to spy on our community and entrap our youth with impunity.
Rather than celebrating the Fourth of July, we celebrated the abolitionist, anti-militarist, decolonial, and immigrant justice social movements and our many social justice-oriented communities where we find the interdependence we rely upon to survive and thrive, the liberty to exist as we are, a sense of home and belonging, and our freedom dreams.
Consensus is growing across U.S. social movements that people living in the U.S. have a responsibility to stand in solidarity with Palestinian liberation due to Washington providing Israel with $3.8 billion in annual military aid. Union teachers are preparing votes in solidarity with the Palestinian people and polls indicate a shift in thinking, particularly on the left and with young people and BIPOC communities.
Solidarity with Palestine is often based on a recognition that the U.S. government has allowed our taxes to fund Israeli state violence and that racist U.S. systems like policing and prisons share resources and technologies with Israel. Yet we should also recognize that the U.S. imposes disastrous neoliberal economic policies on Palestinians and that these policies are essential to U.S. domination of many parts of the Arab region and North Africa.
For example, in many countries in that region, U.S.-led economic neoliberalism is devastating the population. The U.S. works closely with authoritarian regimes in countries like Egypt that also partner with Israel and global neoliberal policies.
In Egypt, the U.S. has imposed accelerated privatization, exacerbating poverty and leading the Egyptian market into selling “cheap labor” to global corporations in exchange for profit – for a few — under the guise of progress.
Recently, the massive growth of the Egyptian prison industry has accompanied these shifts. In April 2021, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information reported that out of Egypt’s 78 prisons, 35 were built after the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011. Out of those 35, 17 have been built since 2016. U.S.-led neoliberal economic policies have substantially shaped this growth. Prisons are increasingly set up in ways that force inmates to pay for meeting their own basic needs and police are profiting off inmates through bribes.
The U.S.-funded militarization of Egypt is partly responsible for problems such as the harsh state violence against detainees and activists who criticize the Egyptian regime and its military and economic policies. The U.S. government gives $1.38 billion annually to Egypt, 90 percent of which goes to military financing due to Egypt’s geostrategic importance in furthering U.S. imperial interests in the region — including the colonization of Palestine and the implementation of regional neoliberal reforms.
The Egyptian regime routinely punishes those publicly criticizing their practices. It is no surprise that more than half of the 120,000 people incarcerated in Egyptian prisons today are political prisoners, including many of the youth celebrated across the world for leading the Egyptian revolution for bread, dignity, and social justice.
Human Rights Watch refers to systematic horrific abuses of Egyptian prisoners as crimes against humanity. In addition, the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program found a perfect home within Egypt’s secret prisons. Starting with Bill Clinton’s administration, the U.S. transferred foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism to interrogation centers in places like Egypt where anti-torture rules are virtually non-existent.
Most people in the U.S. do not closely follow the grave impact of U.S. policy on the region, notwithstanding recent breakthroughs with support for ending the war on Iraq or the popular movement for Palestinian liberation.
Nascent linkages between Palestinian freedom and Black Lives Matter movements do, however, point the way toward growing international solidarity. Similarly, the movement for prison abolition in the U.S. could be strengthened through a more robust global agenda. U.S. financial support for torture in Egypt is an extension of U.S. policies of genocide and enslavement, which continue today through the incarceration, torture, and dehumanization of BIPOC communities within the prison industrial complex. Resistance against the privatization of U.S. prisons would benefit from more global solidarity.
Working with mothers of police torture survivors in the organization MAMAS, I have heard many accounts of violence by the Chicago Police Department. Chicago mothers of police torture survivors sound very much like mothers I know in Egypt. Leftist mothers like Laila Soueif, whose two children are incarcerated as punishment for their involvement in the 2011 revolution, spend days and nights protesting outside prisons waiting to learn if their children are dead or half alive. Communities in Cairo and Chicago are both up against direct and indirect funding from the U.S. government.
Economic disinvestment policies devastating Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities in the U.S. contribute to the targeted criminalization of BIPOC communities. Privatization preceded the police killing of Mike Brown and the Ferguson uprising which linked Black Lives Matter and Palestine freedom activists and eventually raised up Congresswoman Cori Bush who has spoken out in Washington for both causes.
As the prices of basic commodities rise across Egypt as a result of privatization, the government encourages economically hurting detainees to learn trades so that they can ally with corporations benefiting from devalued Egyptian labor. Global neoliberalism thrives on both poverty and prisons, be they in the U.S., Egypt, or elsewhere. They reinforce each other. Global corporations benefit as they profit from cheap labor.
If we want a robust prison abolitionist movement that can truly dismantle the foundations of the prison industrial complex, it must be global. If we want solidarity with Palestinian and Arab social movements then we need to understand the region and its significance to U.S. imperialism. No one Arab country is an island. The impact of U.S. policy in one country is regional and related to developments in neighbors.
Many regional leaders, like Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, are friends of the U.S. government which provides the funding to oppress Egyptians and their Arab neighbors in places like Palestine. The arrangement with the Israeli government is similar.
Activist groups in the U.S. are pressing the Biden administration to stop military funding to countries such as Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia for its war on Yemen. Rights groups are urging the Biden administration to change course in its annual military assistance package to Egypt by compelling the regime to improve its rights record and emphasizing Biden’s campaign promise of “no more blank checks for Trump’s favorite dictator.”
Deepened regional and global analysis alongside increasing international solidarity will be crucial to advancing mutual abolitionist, Palestinian liberation, and anti-imperialist campaigns.
Shortly after his inauguration, President Joe Biden reversed former President’s Donald Trump’s Muslim Travel Ban, stating those actions are a stain on our national conscience.” This stance aligns with that of the tens of thousands of protesters who, at the time the first Muslim Travel Ban was enacted in January 2017, took to the streets and to airports across the country with slogans such as, “We are all Immigrants,” “Standing with Muslims against Islamophobia,” and “Stop Hatred against Muslims.” To be sure, the Muslim Travel Ban is a racist policy. It seeks to keep out or deport people perceived to be Muslim based upon the racist assumption that “they” are violent potential terrorist enemies of the U.S. nation. The ban was an executive order that prevented individuals from primarily Muslim countries, and later, from many African countries, from entering the United States.
Yet ending the Muslim Ban only scratches the surface of a much larger problem. If progressives really want to end anti-Muslim racism, we are going to need a more radical approach, that requires, as Angela Davis reminds us, “grasping things at the root.” The root cause of the Muslim Ban is anti-Muslim racism, which has many roots. Europeans perceived Islam and Muslims as a barbaric threat ever since its arrival in the 7th century. White Christian supremacist thought perceived “Islam” as a threat when Black people found within it liberatory possibilities in the context of the transatlantic slave trade and far beyond. Contemporary anti-Muslim racism grew especially out of the post-Cold War period when the U.S. began launching its imperialist wars in the Arab region and growing its unconditional support for Israeli settler-colonialism. Out of this context, anti-Muslim racism, based on the idea that all Palestinians and Arabs are Muslim and all Muslims are potential terrorists, was institutionalized through domestic and global policies and the U.S. corporate media’s rhetoric.
After the U.S. first confirmed its alliance with Israel in 1967, U.S. government and media rhetoric portrayed Palestinians Arabs and Muslims as terrorist enemies. At this time, the FBI began harassingand stifling the voices of Arab students and activists based upon this racist logic. In the 1980s, seven Palestinians and one Kenyan were placed into deportation proceedings for enacting free speech rights. Their case, referred to as the L.A. 8, revealed a secret plan to intern Arab Americans. The period of the first Iraq war brought President Bill Clinton’s Omnibus Counterterrorism Bill, introduced by then-Sen. Joe Biden, granting the U.S. government the power to deport individuals based upon secret evidence. A form of racial profiling, the U.S. used this bill to target primarily Arab Muslim men. The post-9-11 era consolidated the racial profiling of people perceived to be Muslim in the U.S. through airport profiling, surveillance of Muslim communities, detention, deportations, special registration of immigrants, and much more. All along, the racist idea of the “Muslim terrorist enemy” has justified the war on terror abroad and legitimized the racial profiling of Muslims in the U.S. as an extension of this war.
Whether it is global war or domestic surveillance, anti-Muslim racism devastates the lives of local Muslim and Muslim American communities. Consider the reality whereby U.S. law enforcement officialshave placed Muslim communities under surveillance that in some cases, have entailed entrapment. Also consider the racial profiling that underlies the current Countering Violent Extremism programwhereby simply praying five times a day can render any Muslim as someone who embodies the potential for violent extremism. While conducting research with Arab American communities, I have met many Muslim immigrant mothers who stay up at night fearing their son will be picked up for a crime they never committed. A simple trip involving air travel also can devastate any Arab or Muslim family. In 2019, an Arab Christian immigrant father told me that he couldn’t print his boarding pass at O’Hare. When he went to the ticket counter with his middle school age kids, the agent announced, in front of everyone in line, that the Department of Homeland Security is blocking him from boarding the plane. Although he may never know why his name showed up on a No-Fly list, his experience with racial profiling has damaged his mental health and that of his children. Anti-Muslim racism within the system of policing takes a distinct toll on the lives of Muslim women. When officers like the Chicago Police Union President’s post that “all Muslims deserve a bullet,” it would not be a stretch to assume that Muslim women are not going to call the police for help when they experience domestic violence. Globally, it is no secret that hundreds of men have been taken to the torturous prison camp of Guantanamo Bay or tortured in overt U.S. prisons like Abu-Ghraib or secret CIA prisons through extraordinary rendition and that millions of Yemenis, Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Iranians and Palestinians have been killed or displaced by U.S.-led militarism. Truly ending anti-Muslim racism will require widescale systemic change. If progressives really care about ending anti-Muslim racism, we need to stand for ending the war on terror in all of its forms. Given recent strikes on Syria, my community of progressive Arab and Muslim immigrants is gravely concerned that Biden may turn out to be a more hawkish than President Trump and that the continuation of the war on terror will have grave anti-Muslim consequences not only abroad, but also here in the U.S. and in Chicago. For instance, the Biden Administration needs to stop all forms of racial profiling, including the surveillance of Arab and Muslim Americans and stop supporting the Israeli government’s oppression of Palestinians, including gross funding for the egregious Israeli military and as founder of Palestine Legal, Dima Khalidi explains, undo Trump’s executive order that silences Palestinian voices in the U.S. The Biden administration also needs to end U.S. support for the war in Yemen and say no to all forms of reckless killing and the use of militarism as a strategy of global political and economic dominance. Such policies changes can go a long way. More than ever before, it’s time to change racist, common sense ways of thinking about Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, and anyone perceived to be connected, in one way or another, to the idea of a “Muslim terrorist threat.”
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The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
