Terrorism is a political act divorced from any religion’s essence

Evidence

The recodification of racism in North America whereby the Jew became the Muslim and the black the brown (or Arab, in a color-coded register) was predicated on a fundamental logical flaw, whereby the criminal acts of a band of militant Muslim adventurers was politicized, identified as definitive to a world religion, and called “Islamic terrorism”. … Islam is a world religion; terrorism is a political act, indiscriminately targeting civilian populations—examples of which in modern history include the Irgun in Palestine, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Janjaweed in Darfur. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 616

The recodification of racism in North America whereby the Jew became the Muslim and the black the brown (or Arab, in a color-coded register) was predicated on a fundamental logical flaw, whereby the criminal acts of a band of militant Muslim adventurers was politicized, identified as definitive to a world religion, and called “Islamic terrorism”. Islam is a world religion; terrorism is a political act, indiscriminately targeting civilian populations—examples of which in modern history include the Irgun in Palestine, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Janjaweed in Darfur. The events of 9/11 and other similar incidents are sporadic criminal acts—conditioned, of course, by wanton American imperialism around the globe—and entirely divorced from any purposeful political project. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 616

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines terrorism as a political act indiscriminately targeting civilians, separating the category from religion.
• DEEPTHINKING: The replacement of Jew-with-Muslim and black-with-brown as the recodification of American racism is a dense, paradigm-shifting insight about how racism persists by migrating its signifiers.
• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s central ‘house Muslim’ framing of Obama and the recodification of racism — resonates with post-9/11 critical race scholarship.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 616

Related

• Terrorism is a political act, not a religious one (similarity 0.94)
• Terrorism is labeled by religion only when the perpetrators are Muslim. (similarity 0.82)
• American racism has recently recoded blacks and Jews into Arabs and Muslims (similarity 0.81)
• Western states reframed non-state political violence as psychopathology to strip it of legitimacy (similarity 0.81)
• The War on Terror globally embedded a racialized terrorist stereotype of Muslims (similarity 0.80)
• Practicing Islam functionally replaced Communism as the most threatening subversive activity (similarity 0.80)
• The War on Terror shifted Muslim Americans down the racial hierarchy away from whiteness (similarity 0.80)
• The racialized Muslim category flexibly absorbs perceived Muslims across ethnicity, nationality, and religion. (similarity 0.80)
• The global war on terrorism rhetorically morphed into a war on Islam and Muslims (similarity 0.79)
• The term terrorism flattened diverse political violence into one undifferentiated category (similarity 0.79)
• Racial targeting makes mere category membership, not enmity, grounds for persecution (similarity 0.79)
• Muslim racialization crosses party lines as both administrations national-security state grew (similarity 0.79)
• Terror-related arrests target not only Arabs but whites, Latinos, and African Americans. (similarity 0.79)
• Racializing enemies as boundless Muslims justifies war against diverse peoples worldwide. (similarity 0.78)
• State violence against civilians is never categorized as terrorism (similarity 0.78)