Mobashra Tazamal is “a researcher on Islamophobia at The Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University.” Her article here illustrates yet again something that I’ve been pointing out for years: for the Hamas-linked Bridge Initiative, a program of the bought-and-paid-for Georgetown University, and for establishment academics such as Mobashra Tazamal, no resistance to the global jihad whatsoever is allowed, no matter how tepid, half-hearted, or fantasy-based. It’s all “Islamophobia.” Any resistance to jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women immediately puts one on the road to becoming as inhumane, brutal, and repressive as Communist China is to the Uighurs. Any opposition to, say, beheading schoolteachers in the middle of the street for showing a cartoon of Muhammad is the “logic of eradication or quarantining.” The only response to jihad violence that Bridge Initiative would find acceptable would be complete surrender.
“Dismantling the counterterror narrative is long overdue,” by Mobashra Tazamal, The New Arab, October 15, 2020 (thanks to Hussam):
Concentration camps, facial recognition cameras, razing of mosques, networks of government informants, and separation of families: this is what the Uighur people, a Turkic ethnic Muslim minority numbering around 11 million, are currently reckoning with in their occupied homeland….
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has defended its actions in the region, describing the camps as “re-education centres” and “hospitals” needed to de-radicalise and rehabilitate Uighurs who are infected by an “ideological virus,” that virus being the second largest belief system in the world: Islam.
Beijing maintains its discriminatory policies are needed because Uighurs are a threat to the stability of China and thus mass imprisonment is necessary “to turn them [Uighurs] into normal persons…”
While China’s violence against Uighurs dates back decades, the language of terrorism entered the government lexicon shortly after US President George W. Bush inaugurated the global “War on Terror”….
This war created a transnational undefined enemy who was not just a political foe but a fundamental threat to the safety of the wider population. Today, Chinese authorities claim that camps and surveillance are needed in order to fight the “three evils” of “separatism, extremism, and terrorism.”
Following the 9/11 attacks, words and phrases such as “radical Islam”, terrorism, and extremism went mainstream.
The hyperfocus on counterterrorism resulted in the development of a cottage industry of self-styled experts who cashed in on lucrative government grants and opportunities. Their studies and analysis were used to support the construction of “radical” or “extremist” Muslims who represented the primary threat to global stability….
In his latest book, Sean Roberts notes how the war on terror discourse has facilitated a “logic of eradication or quarantining a threat that is culturally profiled as an ‘extremist’ strain within Islam [and that] fosters an aggressive Islamophobia that is ultimately pregnant with genocidal tendencies.”
By marking Muslim populations as “terrorists”, states brand the entire population a threat to the global system, “making them not just deserving of marginalisation but of complete obliteration or intensive quarantining.” Such is the “logic” China uses to defend its genocidal campaign against Uighur Muslims.
Governments across the world continue to use the counterterror language to target, scapegoat, persecute, and eliminate Muslim communities in their own countries. The authorities label these groups “extremist” or “terrorists,” allowing them the space to carry out violence without much international condemnation….