The FBI’s Vulgar Betrayal program decimated Brooklyn’s Pakistani community

Evidence

In The Feeling of Being Watched, journalist Assia Boundaoui captures the fear, stress, and even paranoia that comes from being surveilled. The documentary is about the FBI surveillance program Vulgar Betrayal and the impact on Boundaoui’s Arab American community in Bridgeview, Illinois. Vulgar Betrayal started in the 1990s and such programs have only amplified after 9/11. The result is that almost every Muslim family knows someone who has been caught up in the national security dragnet. Entire communities have been disrupted. For instance, at the beginning of the millennium, Brooklyn was home to about a quarter million people of Pakistani origin. By 2003, as many as 50,000–60,000 were reported to have left; they were either jailed, deported, or had fled the witch-hunt mentality pervading the city. What was known as “little Pakistan,” Junaid Rana argues, became a shell of its former self, with businesses shuttered and restaurants closed down. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 538

Categorization

• SHARE: Share with anyone studying post-9/11 domestic surveillance or neighborhood demographic displacement — the specific 50,000-60,000 exodus figure from little Pakistan is striking.
• XREF: connects to: The FBI engineered inter-community hatred among American Muslims — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 399; FBI coerced Muslim community members into informing using fabricated threats — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 563

Broader Connections

• The FBI engineered inter-community hatred among American Muslims #corroborates (0.85) — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 399
• FBI coerced Muslim community members into informing using fabricated threats #expands (0.80) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 563