Tenuous guilt-by-association ties branded a US teacher a jihadist over Palestinian-rights support

Evidence

The campaign reached fever pitch when the new McCarthyites found a picture of a T-shirt with the slogan “Intifada NYC” produced by the group Arab Women Active in the Arts and Media (AWAAM), a local Arab feminist organization. The connection between AWAAM and Almontaser was that they shared an office with the Yemeni-American association on whose board Almontaser sits. This was all the “evidence” that the Islamophobic warriors needed to brand Almontaser as a “jihadist” since she supported Palestinian rights. … The New York Post carried a story that stated that the T-shirt was “apparently a call for a Gaza-style uprising in the Big Apple.” Almontaser’s efforts to explain the meaning and significance of the term intifada were countered by an ADL spokesperson who called AWAAM “an active supporter of the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas.” The usual anti-Palestinian crowd all chimed in and the pressure mounted. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 682

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism here — ADL labeling Palestinian solidarity as terrorist, tenuous association as evidence — directly matches the reader’s question about channels transmitting anti-Arab racism into Islamophobia. — connects to: Arab-language education was smeared as terrorist by guilt-by-association campaigns — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 670; Guilt by the thinnest association sufficed to brand an educator a jihadist. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 531; The network smeared a secular educator by fabricating guilt-by-association with Muslim groups (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Guilt by the thinnest association sufficed to brand an educator a jihadist. #corroborates (0.95) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 531
• The network smeared a secular educator by fabricating guilt-by-association with Muslim groups #expands (0.85)
• Muslim Americans bear collective guilt for unrelated Muslim terrorists #complicates (0.75) — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 346