[A new report released by Rutgers University shows how anti-Muslim
bigotry pervades U.S. discourse on Palestine.]
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US FOREIGN POLICY ESTABLISHMENT IS INSTRUMENTALIZING ISLAMOPHOBIA,
REPORT SHOWS  
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Tyler Walicek
November 12, 2023
Truthout
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_ A new report released by Rutgers University shows how anti-Muslim
bigotry pervades U.S. discourse on Palestine. _

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks from the Oval Office of the White
House on October 19 about the wars in Ukraine and Israel., AP

 

An incisive new report
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by researchers affiliated with Rutgers University lays out in detail
the many ways in which the U.S. political establishment has
instrumentalized anti-Muslim bigotry and disingenuously redefined the
idea of “antisemitism” in order to defuse criticisms of the
Israeli government and justify dehumanizing policies toward
Palestinians.

Titled “Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the
Palestine-Israel Discourse,” the 68-page report offers a thorough
examination of how the domestic foreign policy establishment and the
associated Israel lobby employ Islamophobia as a tool of ideological
legitimation.

Though the report’s origins predate the immediate crisis, its
critique is a valuable intervention in the current political moment.
While civilian deaths accrue in the course of Israel’s
indiscriminate, genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip — more than
10,000
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have been killed as of this writing — lopsided Western media
prerogatives continuously deny the populace a clear view on the
crisis. In the background, the anti-Muslim bigotry that is rampant in
U.S. culture helps ensure that Palestinians of all faiths, Arab people
in general and Muslims across the world do not earn the public’s
sympathies.

The very day that the report was released, the U.S. House of
Representatives took a noteworthy step that further underscored the
truth of the authors’ claims: Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) —
the only Palestinian American in Congress — was formally censured by
her congressional colleagues
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The charges against her
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She had referred to Israel as an apartheid system (as major human
rights organizations concur) and posted a video taken of street
demonstrators as they chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine
will be free.” The vote to rebuke her for doing so was decidedly
bipartisan
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INFLUENCE NETWORKS

“Presumptively Antisemitic” was commissioned by the Rutgers Law
School’s Center for Security, Race and Rights. “It could not have
come out at a more important time,” said report coauthor Mitchell
Plitnick in an interview with _Truthout_ about the project. Plitnick
— a co-director of Jewish Voice for Peace, director of the U.S.
office of B’Tselem, and president of the nonprofit ReThinking
Foreign Policy — was commissioned by Rutgers to coauthor the report
with Rutgers law professor and social justice scholar Sahar Aziz
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The genesis of the report, said Plitnick, dates to two years ago, when
the authors sought to confront “a long history of U.S. policy that
really diminishes Palestinian rights.” As Plitnick explained it,
other analyses often interrogate the question of “why we elevate
Israel.” But in this report, he said, “We’re asking the other
side: Why do we find it so easy to diminish the rights of
Palestinians?”

One answer is that Israel is a singularly important U.S. client state,
and there are big incentives, chiefly strategic and economic, to
launder its actions and forestall any threat to its power or
legitimacy. Capitalist society evinces a deep need to justify policies
advantageous to its material interests and sanitize any violence
involved in the pursuit of those interests; this is central to its
process of ideologically and materially reproducing itself. Cruel and
disingenuous justificatory ideology is the inevitable structural
product of this need.

Key to disseminating such ideology is, of course, the media — which
in the U.S. is constructed around a set of incentives and boundaries
that work unconsciously to weed out dissenters and quash critical
inquiry while serving up the preferred official narratives. These
mechanisms are sufficient to produce both remarkable party-line
conformity _and_ the appearance of a free and critical press by
allowing fervent debate and critique — within very strict bounds. In
our era, those bounds are fortified by, among other things, tacit
Islamophobia. To venture beyond them in a mainstream venue — like,
say, by acknowledging Israeli apartheid
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on _CNN_ — is to go beyond the pale. (So much so that it’s
newsworthy in itself
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happens.)

To determine some origins of this type of Islamophobic narrative
propaganda — the examples not traceable to U.S. government
mouthpieces, that is — the Rutgers authors looked to pro-Israel
organizations with more reactionary leanings, the kind that tend to
make common cause with those farther on the right. These organizations
often “spend a great deal of their time undermining and caricaturing
Palestinians as inherently violent, inherently dishonest,” Plitnick
told _Truthout_. Unsurprisingly, he said the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is a major faction
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But members of the Israel lobby also include right-wing extremists
like the erratic “Zionist Organization of America,” which, for a
time, had the ear of the Trump administration
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The evangelical right
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meanwhile, has a well-funded
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network of Christian and right-wing Zionist organizations: dense
warrens where reactionary backlash gestates and racial fears fester.
There are the blandly conservative religious types like Christians
United for Israel. Other groups appear deceptively innocuous, with
names like “Middle East Forum” or the “Center for Security
Policy.” (Others, like “Jihad Watch,” perhaps not so much.)
These are joined by all manner of nationalist and militarist
right-wing think tanks and advocacy organizations with interests that
dovetail with those of the Israel lobby. Building on the ubiquitous
anti-Muslim media coverage during the “global war on terror,”
their bigotry, the report highlights, found legislative expression in
so-called anti-Sharia laws
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(concerning, if absurd). Across the nation, per the report, right-wing
money “supports a wide array of projects aimed at vilifying Muslims
and politically penalizing advocacy for Palestinian human rights.”

The linkages between such groups and the media are so impossibly
tangled as to be indistinguishable; conservative and liberal pundits
alike can reliably be heard repeating the same logics, if not the same
verbatim talking points. It appears on the vaunted _New York Times_
opinion page
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voiced by columnists like Bret Stephens
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cultural substrate — what passes for “common sense” in U.S.
discourse.

SELF-APPOINTED LEGITIMACY

The Rutgers authors then delve into analyzing examples of Islamophobia
of the U.S. variety, which revels in general dehumanization. The most
common reflex is to insist that all Muslim or Arab people are
terrorists (and therefore valid targets), or to otherwise retread all
the age-old tropes [[link removed]] about
aggression or deceitfulness.

The charge of antisemitism can inflict considerable damage, and
disingenuously weaponizing it remains the most reliable weapon in the
Israel lobby’s rhetorical arsenal. Domestically, the claim is
weaponized against any critics of the Israeli government — often
with accompanying career or personal consequences
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Blacklisting, firing, doxing
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or other ostracizations may well ensue. Yet, equating all criticism of
Israel with antisemitism is ultimately an act of hubris. By diluting
the term, as is noted by report authors, overreliance on the cynical
smear only “blunts efforts against real antisemitism.”

Caught in the pincer maneuver of dehumanization and antisemitism,
advocacy for Palestinian human rights has long been discredited by
default in the U.S. The Palestinian struggle is “depicted in the
media and by American politicians as almost entirely violent,” the
report states, “even though non-violent action has been far more
prominent and consistent in their struggle.”

The latter points speaks to an absurd double bind — violence is
condemned, and yet “non-violent means of resistance, such as the
Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, are _also_
discredited as antisemitic and illegitimate.” (As well as, in the
case of BDS, literally criminalized, as Plitnick has detailed
elsewhere
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It seems that, violent or peaceful, there’s no pleasing occupation
apologists — Palestinians should be obliged to retreat to total
passivity and inaction, mutely enduring any and all crimes committed
against them.

It’s instructive to contrast dominant narratives on Palestine with
the establishment reaction to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, as
the report authors do in their introduction. That February, it
suddenly dawned on the whole Western world that violent resistance to
foreign occupation was self-evidently legitimate. But those hoping
that this revelation might persist and bring an end to some
hypocrisies — well, that proved far too much to hope for, certainly
in the case of Palestine. (And among the U.S. public and Secretary of
State Antony Blinken’s blob
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alike, it didn’t even seem to spark much meaningful reflection on
the most obvious comparison, i.e. Iraq.) This is the result we can
expect, given that a blanket of propaganda has smothered the facts of
the occupation and the long history of nonviolent Palestinian activism
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along with the many Palestinian voices who advocate for peace and are
clear that they take issue with state and military policy, not the
Jewish people.

One of the key points of this report is this Islamophobic trope, this
assumption, that all Muslims are antisemitic by default. They have to
prove that they’re not,” Plitnick told _Truthout_. It has been a
signature success of domestic propaganda, so effective that it
produces outlier cases even among nominal leftists: the “progressive
except Palestine” caveat. Nationwide, the notion has been implanted
that, “at its core, standing up for Palestinian rights is motivated
by antisemitism — not by wanting to protect human rights. Not by
caring about the suffering of literally millions of people in the West
Bank and Gaza,” Plitnick said.

The bipartisan congressional censure of Representative Tlaib is a
recent and precise example (among others
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of this type of bad-faith conflation. This was also the case the last
time she was scolded
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by both sides of the aisle — in 2021, as the report cites, she was
rebuked for pointing out, again, the demonstrable fact that Human
Rights Watch considers Israel an apartheid state
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Time and again, as the report puts it, the “defense of the human
rights of Palestinians” is “disingenuously turned … into an
attack on Jewish people everywhere.”

LOCATING A PRESSURE POINT

The coauthors, by the report’s conclusion, have identified three key
realms of intervention: including Palestinian and other Muslim or Arab
people in policy making and media, ensuring academic freedom and free
speech at universities
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and holding “Israel accountable for violating human rights.” As
murderous bombing campaigns and a ground invasion roll through the
Gaza Strip, many have to hold onto hope that such accountability may
someday come.

In the meantime, the Rutgers findings serve to corroborate the sense
that the enforcement of the Israel consensus since October 7, by its
reflexive recourse to both Islamophobia and/or charges of
antisemitism, is starting to mimic vintage war on terror-era
Islamophobia
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old tropes dusted off
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hates recertified. After all, over 20 years, the U.S. has had a lot of
practice at legitimizing the killing of innocent people in the Middle
East. Perhaps that’s why, in a small but telling moment, the onetime
Iraq War cheerleader
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President Joe Biden found it so easy to handwave
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the Gaza Health Ministry’s (proven accurate) death count.

Regardless, between refusing to pressure their client for a ceasefire
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and running cover for Israeli atrocities, it can indeed seem that, as
the report puts it, “The U.S. government’s message is clear:
Palestinian lives do not matter. Worse yet, Muslims and Arabs
advocating to change this reality are defamed as antisemites and
censored.”

Yet it would be a grave mistake to overlook one fact: that solidarity
between peoples is what subjugating powers most fear. From the report:
“Discrediting any criticism of Israeli state practices violating
Palestinian human rights as antisemitism overlooks the growing number
of Jews and Muslims working together to promote Palestinian rights.”
Further, Plitnick points out that, “We’ve seen, just in these past
weeks, the tremendous effect that Jewish-Muslim unity has to oppose
not only U.S. policy in Palestine, but also Islamophobia and
antisemitism here at home.”

As he notes, this is an extremely powerful force. “It removes from
the right this argument that defense of Israel and these policies are
somehow defending Jews, when really they’re doing harm towards Jews,
and quite a bit of harm towards Jews,” Plitnick told _Truthout_.
“We’re standing up, and our Muslims allies and brothers and
sisters are standing with us, and that’s a really important piece of
the whole.”

===

Copyright © Truthout. Reprinted with permission. May not be reprinted
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