Today’s anti-Muslim surveillance infrastructure has no precedent except the Nazi anti-Jewish apparatus.

Evidence

For example, there have been earlier wars on terror, which have often focused on racialised suspect minorities (the nineteenth-century panic about Fenians; the globally co-ordinated war on anarchism of the 1890s–1900s, which gave birth to many modern policing techniques; the first red scare in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution; the second red scare during the Cold War14), but the global infrastructure of surveillance, incarceration and killing that is today focused on Muslims has no precise precedent. The closest we come to it in history, in essence though not in scale, is the structure of the anti-Jewish surveillance and control apparatus of the Nazi state and then empire, particularly the work in the late 1930s of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) internal intelligence office, AMT II 112, which tracked Jewish conspiracies around the globe. However, the aim of the Nazis was not, ultimately, to control or defeat one single category of Jew—a political Jew, analogous to the West’s political Muslim of today. For the Nazis, all Jews were the political enemy. And from the summer of 1941, the Nazi elite aimed to murder every single Jew—nothing less. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 67

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarian security agencies and Foucault’s surveillance apparatus frameworks.
• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between a political enemy category (political Muslim) and a total enemy category (all Jews) refracts the entire question of whether Islamophobia is racism — the West’s Muslim enemy is selectively defined, unlike the Nazis’ totalizing Jew.