Cold War hypocrisy and stalled civil rights fueled NOI growth

Evidence

Even the FBI admitted internally that drawing additional attention to the NOI may have backfired, making the organization and its leaders Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X even more popular. There was also a larger context to the movement’s growth. The US prosecution of the Cold War, its manipulation of newly independent African and Asian states, the beginning of the Vietnam conflict, and the lack of real progress on social equality at home made the religious and political critique of the NOI convincing to many both inside and outside the movement. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 406

Categorization

• XREF: The dynamic of surveillance/attention backfiring and boosting the surveilled movement parallels later government responses to Muslim organizing; connects to the book’s through-line of state fear producing the feared outcome.