Racializing enemies as boundless Muslims justifies war against diverse peoples worldwide.

Evidence

Anti-Muslim racism operates in complicated and incongruous ways for a reason. Especially since 9/11, and under the name of the War on Terror, by constructing an enemy of the state as porous and boundless, as anywhere and everywhere, the U.S. justifies waging war against diverse people and regions all lumped together as “Muslims” whether or not they are Muslim or share a particular country of origin, political view, or appearance. Even as this rationale of racializing those who are deemed “Muslim-looking,” it is Muslims across the United States who are the primary targets of policing under the War on Terror policies. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 540

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Explains the core mechanism of anti-Muslim racialization: an internally contradictory enemy-construction that nonetheless polices real Muslim communities.

Related

• Constructing the enemy as boundless justifies war across all regions and peoples (similarity 0.92)
• The War on Terror racializes all Muslims as a boundless enemy to justify war (similarity 0.92)
• The global war on terrorism rhetorically morphed into a war on Islam and Muslims (similarity 0.85)
• The War on Terror globally embedded a racialized terrorist stereotype of Muslims (similarity 0.85)
• Multiple intersecting macro factors, not single causes, produce systematic anti-Muslim discrimination (similarity 0.83)
• The War on Terror deliberately deepens civilizational divides rather than repairing them (similarity 0.83)
• The War on Terror fused the concepts of Muslim and terrorist. (similarity 0.82)
• War on Terror homogenized Muslims the way earlier eras homogenized Native Americans and Africans (similarity 0.82)
• Racialization casts whites as individuals and Muslims as an undifferentiated mass. (similarity 0.82)
• Anti-Muslim racism contains internal contradictions and countervailing tendencies that resist neat causal models (similarity 0.82)
• The War on Terror functions as an imperial project spreading Islamophobia globally (similarity 0.82)
• Racialized religion explains why religious-freedom advocates justify targeting Muslims. (similarity 0.81)
• The racialized Muslim category is fluid enough to absorb non-Muslims perceived as Muslim (similarity 0.81)
• The War on Terror shifted Muslim Americans down the racial hierarchy away from whiteness (similarity 0.81)
• Practicing Islam functionally replaced Communism as the most threatening subversive activity (similarity 0.81)