Airport profiling targets Muslims as a religious class, not any specific nationality

Evidence

Using federally funded lists in airports is one example of how the state institutionalizes and participates in the racialization of Muslim bodies through hypersurveillance because of the War on Terror. The profiling of Muslim men in airports is not random, but systemic. Even after TSA agents interrogated Muslim men and it was determined it was safe for them to board an airplane, they were still subjected to surveillance the next time they flew. The act of being stopped, searched and interrogated publicly because of one’s religious identity confirms to the public your body is suspect and should be surveilled. The examples provided previously show that the state is not targeting specific nationalities or ethnicities, but Muslims in general. This is why a Pakistani Muslim American man had similar experiences in airports as a Lebanese Muslim American. State surveillance impacts Muslim men, not just Arab men. This was apparent in the way the U.S. government focused on twenty-four Muslim-majority countries through NSEERS and visa holds after 9/11: Arab countries (Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq) and African countries (Sudan and Somalia) as well as South Asian countries (Pakistan and Bangladesh). — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 208

Categorization

• XREF: Directly anchors the reader’s map of surveillance racializing Muslims — connects to Beydoun, Rana, Sian, Bazian COINTELPRO thread.
• QUESTION: The NSEERS twenty-four-country list is a concrete empirical referent worth pinning down for the religion-vs-race argument.