American security agents carried a Washington worldview into rural Wajir

Evidence

Virtually everything that I saw signaled to me that Wajir was a world away from Washington. Its red earth clashed with the gray urban concrete of the District of Columbia, and the slowly plodding men and headscarved women had a distinctly different look and rhythm than the suits rushing about the American capital. Wajir was not Washington, until the latter descended on it in the form of the two agents seated next to us. In the words of Malcolm X, Plymouth Rock landed on them. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 143

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• SEED: The Malcolm X framing ‘Plymouth Rock landed on them’ could anchor a short essay on how imperial surveillance recasts victim populations as threats in their own homelands.

Related

• American counterterrorism doctrine traveled to distant Muslim regions as empire (similarity 0.87)
• The US borrowed its domestic counter-radicalization program from the UK (similarity 0.81)
• US agents in Wajir read the refugee population as radicals rather than victims (similarity 0.79)