Criminalizing dissent and sacralizing individual crimes are two sides of one false consciousness
Evidence
Desacralizing criminal acts (and seeing them for what they are) is coterminous with decriminalizing political dissent (and celebrating it for what it inspires—resistance). What we are seeing today is exactly the opposite: criminal acts by individual Muslims are attributed to the very essence of their religion, while acts of political dissent in protest against the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the United States and Israel are criminalized. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 557
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines the paired operations of desacralizing/decimalizing acts versus criminalizing dissent as reverse sides of the same falsifying consciousness.
- SEED: Essay angle: the rhetorical double-move whereby attributing individual Muslim crimes to Islam’s essence requires simultaneously criminalizing political dissent — the two work as one mechanism.