The Ground Zero mosque controversy grew from an organized pro-Israel campus campaign.

Evidence

As Max Blumenthal notes, the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy is “the fruit of an organized, long-term campaign by a tight confederation of right-wing activists and operatives who first focused on Islamophobia soon after the September 11th attacks, but only attained critical mass during the Obama era.” He explains that the efforts began in the early 2000s, when a coalition of Jewish groups ranging from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) to AIPAC came together to address what they saw as a sudden increase in pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses. The key targets on campuses were Middle East scholars whose work challenged the right-wing narrative of Middle East politics generally and of the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 526

Categorization

• QUESTION: Reader’s guiding question about connecting imperial project to Zionism — this is a concrete organizational link worth chasing.
• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s guiding question on how the imperial project connects to Zionism — ties to Grosfoguel/Rana/Selod discussions. — connects to: Campus repression of Palestine speech is asymmetric since endorsing Israel faces no comparable suppression. — Evelyn Alsultany, Antisemitism and Islamophobia The…, 27; Pro-Israeli groups incubated organized Islamophobia to police campuses; The Islamophobia campaign began as a campus-police project against pro-Palestinian scholars