The freedom-fighter versus terrorist distinction is intensely racial

Evidence

The world became even more absurd when Russia invaded Ukraine in late February 2022, several years after I began writing this book. What explains the world of difference between the Ukrainian struggle for freedom and the ongoing quests for self-determination in Muslim-majority lands? Why are Ukrainians “freedom fighters,” while Muslims struggling for that very same dignity and independence in occupied Kashmir or the West Bank, Gaza or Yemen are dubbed “terrorists”? Theaters where a protracted war on terror renders anybody Arab, Brown, or Muslim as a putative terrorist, notwithstanding the righteousness of their struggle or the unhinged imperialism of their opponents. Shortly after the invasion, I wrote in the Washington Post that “the public’s ideal of freedom fighter and terrorist is intensely racial, which enables the seeing of lay Ukrainians taking arms and throwing molotov cocktails as heroes and Muslims engaged in the very same acts, in pursuit of the same self-determination, as extremists.” Terrorism was made in the image of the dark and brooding Muslim, while the blonde-haired and blue-eyed archetypes out of Ukraine that saturated our television screens and social media timelines were shrouded with the innocence and valor of whiteness, the very face of racial domination that reigned over the nation that made the War on Terror, its new global crusade. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 160

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: the Ukraine war as a live demonstration of racialized terrorism discourse — same acts (armed resistance to imperial invasion) read as heroic in whiteness and extremist in brownness, a testable claim against coverage of the same period in Palestine/Yemen/Kashmir.
• SHARE: A sharp, quotable claim — the race-coded split between Ukrainian resistance and Muslim resistance — for someone writing on comparative framing of occupied peoples.
• XREF: Echoes the reader’s book ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ and the general ‘loyalty vs. suspicion’ framing of Muslim identity versus white innocence; also connects to racial formation theory (Omi & Winant).