State surveillance machinery built for the red scare targets each successive dissident group.

Evidence

Thus, the NYPD surveillance program included not just Muslim Americans but liberal political groups as well. Similarly, the FBI used agents provocateurs to entrap activists in the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) hashtag and movement, begun in 2013 after the murder of Trayvon Martin, has been called “terrorist.” In her book When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors outlines not only how the rhetoric of terrorism is used to discredit the Movement for Black Lives but also how it normalizes violence against black and brown people. Terrorism as a category is fluid and opportunistic and can be expanded to include new and emerging threats. In the context of the mass multiracial BLM uprisings against police violence in the summer of 2020, Trump declared his intention to designate the anti-fascist political movement Antifa as a terrorist organization. This should not surprise anyone since measures used to control Communists and later the New Left, anti-war, and civil rights activists like COINTELPRO were applied to Arab Americans and later Iranian Americans. The McCarran–Walter Act originally designed to target leftists was expanded to include supporters of Palestinian rights. Whether during the Cold War and the “red scare” or the war on terror and the “green scare,” the imperial state is ever vigilant, seeking to quell insurgency before it can threaten the system. Those seeking justice and equity have nothing to gain from supporting the war on terror. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 643

Categorization

• XREF: Ties directly to the reader’s tracking question: the same counter-subversive channel (COINTELPRO to Arab Americans to Palestinian-rights supporters) keeps operating, and is now the conduit for labeling pro-Palestinian activists as terrorist supporters under Gaza. — connects to: Anti-communist control mechanisms are recycled to target each successive racialized or dissident group — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 557
• SEED: Potential essay angle: tracing one channel with named legislative/administrative links (McCarran-Walter expanded to Palestinian-rights supporters) as documentary evidence of the 1967-79-to-Gaza continuity Bayoumi’s claim lacks.

Broader Connections

• Anti-communist control mechanisms are recycled to target each successive racialized or dissident group #corroborates (0.98) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 557