Arab American political inclusion was purchased as geopolitics demanded

Evidence

In the 1990s, the Arab/Muslim population of Michigan experienced steady increases in political incorporation, even as the United States waged war against Iraq, imposed brutal sanctions on that country, and occasionally lobbed rockets at al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. Institutions and events now taken as evidence of Arab/Muslim cultural acceptance—for instance, the Arab American National Museum and the Dearborn Arab International Festival—have their origins in the mid-1990s, when Arab American organizations reaped the benefits of increased publicand private-sector funding. The latter came in the wake of the 1993 Oslo Accords, when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) worked out a tentative peace agreement and Arabs living in the United States were brought into the larger geopolitical control mechanism known as “the peace process.” Throughout the 1990s, America’s generalized antipathy toward its own Arab/Muslim citizens gave way to Ramadan breakfasts in the White House and brazen attempts by US presidential candidates to woo Michigan’s Arab and Muslim votes. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 688

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the contrast in [686] between embrace and stigmatization; relevant to comparing how this chapter vs Grosfoguel’s locates the frightened subject. — connects to: Cold War geopolitics made citizenship courts expand racial inclusion of Muslims; Arab Americans’ racial exclusion from whiteness tracks the rise of US global empire — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 248
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: to what degree did the Oslo ‘peace process’ specifically function as a toggle for US treatment of its Arab citizens — could this support the volume’s theme that Americans tolerate minorities instrumentally?