COVER STORY death and destruction to life, liberty and lawfulness. As a result, these “sociopaths” prove to American viewing audiences that the Arab, Muslim and Other has less objective human value than the white protagonist and his/her comrades. This differentiation in terms of form, function and, crucially, motivation between the American hero and the Muslim villain provides a video record of racial and cultural stratification reified and sustained by an active, conceptual vocabulary that helps construct subjective and largely inflexible frames of collective association and deflective dissociation — the ever-popular us vs. them. In our politics, schools and, most certainly, our cultural products, the U.S. promotes the construction of Muslims generally, and of Muslim Americans specifically, as a present Other. These simplistic, often binary constructions derive from our assertions that Muslims like Reps. Tlaib and Omar are decidedly unlike us. They are reified wherever we allow Muslim students to be victimized by bullies and bigots. And they are ubiquitously distributed in our film and TV products, which portray Muslims as having a profound disregard for humanity, the likes of which we simply cannot fathom. Muslims are in the U.S., therefore, but remain outside its mainstream cultural and political spaces. In other words, we allow them into American society, but only in a muted form. And so, disturbing as it is for those concerned about American racism, Republican neo-fascism, and the true embrace of liberal democracy in the U.S., Islamophobia remains a de facto form of engagement in public institutions. While its documentation and identification may be on the rise, the country and its foundational institutions still have a great deal of work to do when it comes to rectifying these practices and enfolding our Muslim brothers and sisters within the banner of legal protection from discrimination, as is being done for so many other marginalized groups today. ih
WHAT WOULD Y WITH $105,865
Still no cure in sight for a m pre-pandemic virus — Islam BY ISMAIL ALLISON
$
105,865,763. According to the findings of “Islamophobia in the Mainstream,” the recently published report by the Council on AmericanIslamic Relations (CAIR), this country’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, that’s the amount of money
Luke Peterson, PhD (The University of Cambridge [King’s College]), Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, works on investigating language, media and knowledge surrounding political conflict in the Middle East. He lives in Pittsburgh, where he regularly contributes to local, national and international media.
20
ISLAMIC HORIZONS MARCH/APRIL 2022
received by 26 anti-Muslim organizations between 2017 and 2019. These organizations are part of what CAIR identifies as the country’s Islamophobia Network, an interconnected, interdependent web of politicians, think tanks, scholars, religious groups and activists who promote
