Official Islamophobia is manufactured by state surveillance rather than arising from public ignorance

Evidence

It was the symbolic threat, the power of dissent, and the critique of US society and US militarism that led the FBI to wage a counterintelligence war against the NOI. That counter-intelligence campaign constructed an anatomy of Islamophobia in every FBI field office and many local law enforcement agencies. The back-and-forth of memoranda to headquarters in Washington and the Central Research Division’s updated “scholarship” on the movement produced habits of fearful surveillance. The FBI spread this Islamophobia to the mainstream media and its consumers through organized and long-running disinformation campaigns. In summary, Islamophobia was not an ignorant reaction of the public to the presence of Muslims in America. It was manufactured. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 412

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘anatomy of Islamophobia’ as the bureaucratic apparatus of field offices, memoranda, and disinformation campaigns — the dissection apparatus itself.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that Islamophobia is not a spontaneous public reaction but an institutionally manufactured state product inverts the commonsense direction of prejudice-from-below.
• XREF: connects to: State surveillance treated militant Islam as more threatening than non-violent Christianity — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 193; Official counterterrorism policy creates the terrain from which far-right Islamophobia grows — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 737