Operation Boulder redeployed COINTELPRO counterinsurgency methods to racialize Arab Americans

Evidence

Building on this work, I have argued elsewhere that the project of terrorist racial formation occurred in the context of empire in crisis. The national security state designated Arab Americans as “terrorists” or “potential terrorists” through the counterinsurgency logic of the Cold War era that saw threats abroad and at home in similar ways. Operation Boulder, a modification of the infamous COINTELPRO project used to target the New Left and activists in the civil rights, black power, American Indian, Puerto Rican, anti-war, and other groups was deployed to target and racialize Arab Americans. As part of the effort to restore US hegemony, conservatives in the United States and Israel played a central role in advancing a counterterrorist program and imperialist agenda on a global scale. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 249

Categorization

• XREF: Names the concrete transmission channel (Operation Boulder, adapted from COINTELPRO) that carried domestic counterinsurgency logic onto Arab Americans — mechanistically answering how anti-Arab racism was produced. Correlates with ch11’s ‘counterinsurgency techniques move between red scare and green scare.’ — connects to: US counterinsurgency logic fused foreign and domestic Arabs into one terrorist threat; COINTELPRO surveillance methods were redeployed to racialize Arab Americans as terrorists — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 249; The War on Terror recycled COINTELPRO-era racial policing tactics against Muslims — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 263 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• COINTELPRO surveillance methods were redeployed to racialize Arab Americans as terrorists #corroborates (0.98) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 249
• The War on Terror recycled COINTELPRO-era racial policing tactics against Muslims #corroborates (0.93) — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 263
• Operation Boulder surveilled thousands of Arab students and deported activists #expands (0.90) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 654
• Surveillance registration programs racialize Arabs and Muslims by codifying essentialized categories #expands (0.82) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 552
• US cold-war policymakers racialized Arabs as inherently prone to extremism #expands (0.78)
• Muslim racialization in America predated the September 11 attacks #complicates (0.75)
• Early-twentieth-century US citizenship cases racialized Syrians as Muslim foreign threats. #expands (0.75) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 205