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UC Berkeley and the 'Islamophobia' Lobby
by Cinnamon Stillwell
FrontPage Magazine May 25, 2012
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The Islamophobia Research
& Documentation Project (IRDP)—a program of the University of
California, Berkeley's Center for Race and Gender (CRG)—recently held its
third annual conference,
"Critical Discourses on Islamophobia: Symbols, Images, &
Representations." As in previous years,
speaker after speaker decried an imaginary racist, imperialist, Orientalist
Western juggernaut, while disregarding the very real predations of Islamism.
The first day of the conference brought in
approximately eighty people at its peak, including a number of women in hijab
(head scarf), typing furiously on laptops. Others sported keffiyehs and
dreadlocks; a smattering of Arabic and French could be heard; and a scruffy,
bearded fellow wandered around with what appeared to be a journal under his
arm, Historicizing Anti-Semitism, that one suspects is not exactly
kosher. It was just another day in Berkeley.
Hatem
Bazian, IRDP director, Near Eastern studies senior lecturer, and
conference convener started out by apologizing for the forty-minute delay in
kicking off the event. He chalked it up to "Muslim Time"—a
reference to the popular phrase among African-Americans, "Colored
People's Time"—and joked that "Swiss watches run forward, but
Muslim watches run backward." He thanked the Council on American-Islamic
Relations (CAIR)—an Islamist
organization posing as a defender of civil rights— for its participation
in the conference (Zahra Billoo, CAIR Northern California Executive Director,
spoke the next day) and for partnering with CRG to produce the 2011 report, "Same
Hate, New Target: Islamophobia and Its Impact in the United States"—a
report that falsely
accuses a number of public figures of perpetrating
"Islamophobia." Bazian also thanked "individuals who send us
hate mail" for demonstrating "the need for this conference,"
about which, he claimed, there had been "considerable chatter,"
including "wild" and "threatening" statements. All this
"despite the fact that we have the first Muslim president," he
added, chuckling. This sarcastic reference to the American public's
perception of Barack Obama's Muslim
background would be repeated throughout the day as incontrovertible
evidence of "Islamophobia."
Tariq
Ramadan, the controversial Oxford University professor of contemporary
Islamic studies and grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna,
demonstrated a capacity for what his critics have described as doublespeak
with his keynote speech. Titled, "A Global Perspective on Constructing
Muslim Otherness," Ramadan's talk was rife with contradiction. At one
point, he acknowledged that the "victim mentality" is
counterproductive for Muslims and other minorities:
People are relying on fear, mistrust, [and]
nurturing the victim mentality. You can see this among Blacks, Latinos, [and]
Muslims. Sometimes they play the victims. Victims are talking to each other.
We are the victims of your colonization, legal colonization. It's the way you
accept the role given by the dominant: you become the victim.
Yet pushing victimhood was the principal
purpose of the conference. Moreover, Ramadan contributed to that narrative by
implying that assimilation—the antidote to the balkanization caused by
nurturing a victim mentality—was impossible in the U.S.:
At the end of the day, you might be a
Muslim-American, Black, Latino, but not really. Us versus them. . . . After
four generations, you are Muslim with an American background.
Ramadan admitted that something other than
mere bigotry might be at the heart of what's been disingenuously dubbed
"Islamophobia":
[S]ome of them are very sincere when it comes
to being scared of the Muslim presence. . . . Try to understand the logic
that is behind the whole thing . . . there is a great deal of mistrust
towards our intentions as Muslims. We should go beyond the discussion of 'we
are discriminated' towards a more comprehensive approach. . . . People can be
genuinely scared; we have to face this.
He then added:
We have to get rid of this idea that the
world is divided between the West and Islam. Instead of speaking about peace
and living together, we respond with a discourse that is exactly the same.
But he went on to do just that, accusing both
Republicans and Democrats of collusion—although he allowed that "some
are less Islamophobic than others"—and claiming that "the people
who are pushing it [are] the Tea Party and the Neocons." Given that the
Tea Party has focused exclusively on economic issues and that Neoconservatism
is hardly a political force to be reckoned with of late, Ramadan's rhetoric
was hopelessly out of touch.
Ramadan eventually revealed why so many find
him so dangerous by hinting at a belief in conspiracy theories surrounding
the 9/11 attacks and the Mohamed Merah shootings
in Toulouse, France, which resulted in the deaths of three soldiers, a rabbi,
and three children at a Jewish school. Acknowledging that "there is a
new anti-Semitism in France, which is coming from Arabs and Muslims," he
then accused "strong Zionist groups" of complicity for somehow
"nurturing this kind of racism." As he put it:
I know about 9/11, but I still have some
questions about behind the scenes, the way it was used . . . I still have
questions about what happened in France [Toulouse]. We should try to
understand the alliances we find behind old enemies.
To imply that "Zionists" are
benefiting from atrocities against Jews and others goes beyond the realm of
conspiracy theory into classical anti-Semitism.
Keith
Feldman, an assistant professor in UC Berkeley's ethnic studies
department, opened the first panel with a jargon-riddled talk titled,
"Seeing Time: Visual Culture in the Drone Wars." Against a backdrop
of the now famous photo of
President Obama and his national security team watching the strike on Osama
bin Laden from the situation room, Feldman noted that the name for the
mission was "Geronimo" and, from this, claimed that killing the
terrorist mastermind was a "residue of late nineteenth century colonial
settler violence." Later, he used a photo of a black lynching victim from
the 1880s to make the same ahistorical comparison, stating, "Take out
the lynch victim, take out the body of Osama bin Laden, and see what the
architecture of violence looks like."
Feldman spent the bulk of his lecture arguing
against using drone strikes to kill terrorists, which he dubbed
"racialization from above," and then asked, "What happens when
Islamophobia takes to the skies?" Undeterred by the marked increase in
drone strikes under Obama, Feldman reserved his ire for former President
George W. Bush, whom he called "the illustrious geographer of the war on
terror." From what he described as "the borders of U.S. imperialist
cartography to the everyday violence of homeland security," there was no
method of combating terrorism that Feldman found acceptable.
Munir Jiwa, founding
director of UC Berkeley's Center for Islamic Studies and assistant professor
of Islamic studies at the Graduate Theological Union, followed with a talk
on, "the hegemonic frames through which Islam and Muslims come to be
framed." These included the controversy surrounding Park 51, otherwise
known as the Ground Zero mosque, about which he contradicted himself. First
he criticized Park 51's opponents by stating, "The idea that a mosque
would contaminate the sacred ground of Ground Zero needs to be put into
question." Then he railed against those who welcomed the project because
organizer Imam Feisal
Abdul Rauf was perceived, as a Sufi, to be a moderate, noting
sarcastically, "Because they were Sufis, it was palatable. These are the
good Muslims building a community center open to all religions." In
other words, neither the project's proponents nor its opponents can win.
Jiwa opposed Western intervention in the
Muslim world in the interest of protecting women's rights, drawing an absurd
moral equivalence between the circumstances of Afghan and American women in
the process:
What if Afghan women were coming to the West
to save American women? What if Afghan women in burkas hearts' bled for women
in this part of the world?
Furthering engaging in moral and cultural
relativism, Jiwa added, "What's more insidious is the new discourse
around gay rights that Massad talks about." Jiwa was referring to
Columbia University associate professor of modern Arab politics and
intellectual history Joseph
Massad, whose
controversial book, Desiring Arabs, posits that homosexuality in
the Muslim only exists as a product of Western cultural imperialism. The
young men being hanged in Iran for the "crime" of homosexuality
would beg to differ.
Jiwa issued an apologia for Muslim violence
in response to perceived blasphemy by asking of the Danish cartoon
controversy, "Why it is that people need to provoke?" He then
blamed author Salmon Rushdie for not "understand[ing] why Muslims were
hurt" when his book, The Satanic Verses, earned him a death sentence
from the late Ayatollah Khomeini.
Zaid Shakir, co-founder—with Hatem Bazian and
Hamza Yusuf—of Zaytuna College, a self-described "Islamic university"
in Berkeley, spoke towards the end of the day. Insinuating that American
Muslims' struggle for justice is analogous and therefore as righteous as that
of black Americans, Shakir urged "Muslims . . . to champion
African-Americans' struggle because it's the same issues." He then made
the hysterical claim that, "anti-Muslim fervor allows Latinos to be put
into concentration camps." Co-opting the language of the Holocaust to
refer to detention centers for illegal immigrants was Shakir's odious way of
inflating his own cause.
Repeating Bazian's opening joke, he referred
to "Obama, the first Muslim president" before launching into a
conspiratorial tirade about the documentary,
Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, which he blamed for
the alleged rise in "Islamophobia" around the 2008 election:
The financiers of the Islamophobic media are
the same people financing Obsession. It was designed to defeat Obama
so that a more pro-war candidate, more right-wing, could win—someone more
subservient to Zionist interests.
Of course, Obama won the election, and with a
majority of the Jewish vote. No doubt, Shakir will chalk up either a win or a
defeat for Obama this year to the Islamophobic Zionists.
It was a day of contradictions, ahistorical
comparisons, numbing jargon, and, most of all, the elevation of victimhood to
a privileged status. If aliens from another planet observed this conference,
they would deduce that the streets of America were filled with murderous mobs
and ranting rednecks out for Muslim blood. Then they would wonder how that is
so when the academics at this conference, Muslim and non-Muslim alike,
exhibited the very opposite: comfortable, professional lives buoyed by
accolades and accommodation. If this is the product of
"Islamophobia," then they have little to fear. Of the consequences
of Islamism, however, the same cannot be said.
Cinnamon Stillwell is the West Coast
Representative for Campus Watch,
a project of the Middle East Forum.
She can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.
Contact information for the office of UC-Berkeley's
chancellor, Robert J. Birgeneau:
This
text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral
whole with complete information provided about its author, date, place of
publication, and original URL.
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