Accommodation versus confrontation of Islamists produce distinct liberal and conservative Islamophobias.

Evidence

This chapter focuses on the foreign policy establishment, which includes politicians of both major parties as well as experts in various think tanks, and their debates about how to think of and frame policy around the “Islamic threat.” I begin by outlining how various state and non-state actors that sought to mobilize Islam on the political stage were understood during the Cold War. This is the context in which Muslims were thought of as good or bad depending on their orientation toward US imperialism and through a process best understood as imperial ethnocentric racism. I then turn to the post–Cold War era to unpack how the two main wings of the foreign policy establishment, the neoconservatives and “realists” or liberal interventionists, view Islamist forces. I draw on international relations expert Fawaz Gerges’s discussion of the “accommodationist” and “confrontationist” approach to the movements of political Islam to capture the debate within the foreign policy establishment. I argue that differences both in rhetoric as well as policy, such as whether to accommodate or confront, have led to different forms of Islamophobia—liberal and conservative. Both are imperial forms of racism. This chapter and the next shed light on how empire is a process. To secure its interests, the United States constantly shifts strategy and tactics. Thus, while Iraq was obliterated in the name of 9/11, Saudi Arabia was not touched even though fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were of Saudi origin. Imperial racism is strategic and purposeful, hence “good” and “bad” Muslims. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 380

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Gerges’s accommodationist vs confrontationist distinction as the analytical frame for foreign policy debates.
• XREF: Connects to Mamdani’s ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim’ thesis and the notion of cultural racism versus wartime racism in imperial discourse. — connects to: Islamophobia spans liberal and conservative mainstreams, not just the fringe right — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 91; Racist framing of Arabs spans both hardline and liberal camps.