Islamophobic propaganda about mosques seeded hearings and counterterror surveilling of Muslim communities

Evidence

One example illustrates how Islamophobic propaganda is amplified in the mainstream media. The new McCarthyites have long claimed that 80 percent of mosques are controlled by jihadists. In 2004, Republican congressman Peter King stated on the Fox News network’s Sean Hannity Show that “eighty to eighty-five percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists.” He backed up his claim by citing the research of Emerson and Pipes. This story was repeated again and again by the Islamophobes, even in the mainstream media. In 2010, Pamela Geller stated that “four out of five mosques preach hate” on CNN. In March 2011, Republican representative Peter King held hearings on the supposed radicalization in American Muslim communities. A few months later, in June 2011, Yerushalmi made the same claim in the spurious report mentioned above. Gaffney immediately endorsed the findings in his column in the Washington Times. The upshot of this propaganda is that few in the media challenged the King hearings, giving credence to the notion that Muslims are in fact being “radicalized” and need to be questioned and monitored in ways similar to the “reds” in the Cold War era. This was also the year when Obama unveiled his Countering Violent Extremism program, which set out to uncover radicalization by deputizing members of the Muslim community to act as surveillance agents. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 697

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates and sharpens existing vault claims about countering-violent-extremism programs deputizing Muslim communities as surveillance — directly parallels Rana and Kundnani material on CVE. — connects to: An unfounded claim about mosques spread across media for years unchallenged; Anti-Muslim propaganda videos drew mainstream security officials as participants; Extremist Islamophobes are mainstreamed as law-enforcement educators and conference speakers — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 694 (+14 more)
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the surveilling-Muslim-communities thread connecting to broader governance-of-difference claims already in the vault.

Broader Connections

• An unchallenged false mosque statistic legitimized McCarthy-style Muslim monitoring #corroborates (0.97)
• The framing of mosques as terror nest legitimated surveillance of religious practice #corroborates (0.95) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 818
• Unchallenged propaganda legitimized monitoring Muslims like Cold War reds #corroborates (0.92) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 559
• State surveillance and propaganda work in concert to produce systemic anti-Muslim racism #expands (0.90)
• Official rhetoric framing Islam as ideology licensed anti-Muslim suspicion #corroborates (0.88) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 864
• Media narratives mark Muslims as bodies that require surveilling #corroborates (0.88) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 250
• Islamophobic media appearances increase public fear and Muslim discrimination #corroborates (0.85)
• A fabricated mosque statistic spread from far right into mainstream media #exemplifies (0.82)
• Counterterrorism rhetoric masks an offensive campaign against Muslims. #expands (0.78)
• Islamophobia operates as ambient background noise masking concrete injustices #qualifies (0.72)