A cluster of 2009 arrests fueled a media narrative conflating Muslim identity with terrorism

Evidence

In 2009, several US citizens or legal residents were arrested for alleged connections to terrorist activity. In the latter part of the year these became high-profile cases that drew sustained media attention. The first prominent case was that of Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan citizen and legal US resident who was arrested in September 2009 on charges of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction. This was followed by David Coleman Headley, a US citizen arrested in October for planning to attack a Danish newspaper. In December, revelations surfaced that Headley may have conspired with operatives of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani group, in the 2008 Mumbai attacks. In March 2010 he pled guilty to all charges in an Indian court. On November 5, Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed thirteen people and wounded thirty at Fort Hood outside Killeen, Texas. The ensuing media circus focused on Hasan’s religion and continued the trend of conflating Islam and violence. Later that month, the federal government indicted eight people in Minnesota for allegedly recruiting approximately two dozen Somali Americans (citizens and legal residents) to fight with an insurgent group in Somalia. That December, five young men from northern Virginia were arrested in Sargodha, Pakistan, accused of traveling there to fight alongside Taliban militants in Afghanistan. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 603

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the book’s earlier chapters cataloging Muslim Americans arrested with little basis, as Kumar notes in the next paragraph.