Counter-radicalization conflates perpetrators’ religion with causes of terrorism.

Evidence

A common feature of the Islamophobia found in both secular liberal and religious conservative circles is the belief that Muslims are prone to “radicalization” more than any other religious group. These conclusions are based on the fallacy that because most terrorism is committed by Muslims globally, Muslims are more likely to commit terrorism. Completely overlooking the political, social, and economic factors causing instability in Muslim-majority countries, such as the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and US support for brutal Muslim dictators, proponents of counter-radicalization focus exclusively on the perpetrators’ religious identities. Whether the logic is that Islam is an illegitimate political ideology, as alleged by the religious conservatives, or that Islam is an illiberal religion in need of reformation, as alleged by the secular liberals, the outcome is the same anti-Muslim racial project: homegrown terrorism. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 946

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: an essay on how structurally identical fallacies unite secular and religious anti-Muslim projects — the left’s ‘illiberal religion’ and the right’s ‘illegitimate ideology’ converging on the same policy outcome.
• DEEPTHINKING: The observation that two seemingly opposed framings (secular reformation vs. religious illegitimacy) produce an identical racial project is a genuinely counterintuitive structural insight worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Radicalization discourse was built to serve counterterrorism policy, not science.; Obama’s counter-radicalization strategy deputized citizens to surveil their own communities; Radicalization theory was designed to serve counterterrorism policy, not truth — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 599 (+4 more)