Limits of Liberal Inclusivity
Today’s most zealous Islamphobes are not right-wing extremists. They are the liberals who spent the last few years performatively condemning Muslim-bashing.
When former President Bill Clinton took the stage at the Democratic Convention in summer 2016, he had an important message for Muslim Americans. For months, Trump had been demonizing the Muslim community and vowing to impose severe restrictions on their rights to travel upon assuming office. The Democratic Party, therefore, had worked hard to present itself as inclusive and Islam-friendly alternative. It was now time to reaffirm this message of inclusivity at the Convention by parading a rainbow alliance of activists and lawmakers. But then came Bill Clinton on the second night. “If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make a future together.”
Muslims across America cringed. Whether or not he had intended to, Bill Clinton had lapsed into a similar style of Trumpism that had horrified Muslims for nearly a year. The implication in Clinton’s statement was that Muslims are a class apart, which is exactly what the other guys were claiming. For Bill Clinton, it seemed like Muslim Americans’ right to be in America was predicated on an allegiance to counter-terrorism and national security; they must prove that they are good Muslims, in other words. The warm welcome the Clintons were offering into the mainstream of the Democratic coalition was, it turned out, conditional.
Muslims did not have a chance to make a future with the Clintons, but within hours of Trump’s election, liberals took their side against Trump. They marched in the streets to protest the Islamophobes in the new administration and made their way to airports across the country to protest the infamous “Muslim ban.” This became one of Trump’s most egregious transgressions, one that liberals seized upon as a rallying cry, along with the atrocities committed against families on the border, or the gross mismanagement of the hurricane in Puerto Rico. For a brief moment, the liberals were the resistors, ready to challenge the new status quo. But it was not meant to last.
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A few years back an ex invited me to come home with her for the holidays and stay with her family—a white, wealthy family living in the suburbs of Seattle. The family was very pleasant to me, even welcoming on occasion, but things soured on the second night of our stay, when I inadvertently made my ex’s mother cry by floating the idea of visiting Iran with her daughter. “I just want my daughter to be safe,” she mumbled through the torrent of tears.
Liberals are fascinating creatures. Through their actions and interactions, they promote themselves as allies, as friends of the oppressed, as staunch proponents of inclusion and diversity. If they are white, they recognize that whiteness is problematic, emblematic of privileges that they do not deserve, but have inherited through flukes of good fortune. They are willing to recognize their historical role as oppressors, as wrongfully privileged, yet they don’t do much to disavow the trappings of their privilege beyond performative gestures of allyship, for which they love to be praised.
I have been thinking about that interaction recently, as I watch the way public opinion in liberal circles has started to shift with the advent of the genocidal assault on Gaza. Long gone is the protective, inclusive language of the Obama- and Trump-era liberals. Instead, the mask has fallen, the “in-this-house-we-love-refugees” signs are being taken down, the lines are being drawn. Behind the veil of inclusivity and civility lies an ever-present fear.
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On November 21st, a series of videos began circulating on Twitter featuring a gray-haired man in his mid-60s harassing a halal cart vendor in New York City. In the videos, recorded by the vendors over a two-week period, the man repeatedly asks questions like “Do you rape your daughter, like Mohammed did?” and “People who use the Qur’an as a toilet. Does it bother you?” The vendors urge the man to leave them alone, to which he responds, “But you’re a terrorist. You support terrorism.”
That the man was Stuart Seldowitz, a former diplomat in the US government and an ex-advisor to former President Obama, was no surprise to many of us who are acquainted with the limits of Democratic liberalism. Here was a man in power who had been awarded a Superior Honor Award from the State Department multiple times, and who felt perfectly comfortable harassing Muslims in his neighborhood, until, of course, he was caught doing so on camera.
When later interviewed about his comments, Seldowitz claimed that the vendors had refused to condemn the October 7th attacks on Israel and expressed support for Hamas, thereby “making [him] rather upset” and prompting his unhinged behavior. While Seldowitz incurred professional and legal consequences for his conduct—though it remains to be seen how severely he will be charged in court—his behavior was by no means an aberration from the norm.
Eve Gerber, the wife of an economics professor at Harvard and economic advisor to the Obama administration, was caught on video on October 14th berating a Harvard graduate student for wearing a keffiyeh. In the video, Gerber follows the person on a neighborhood sidewalk, before the camera captures her saying, “thank you for walking through the neighborhood and making families feel unsafe with your terrorist scarf.” When the video surfaced on Twitter a month later, Gerber posted an apology online.
On 10/14, after I overheard chants I found disturbing at a rally near my home, I spoke with a person on my block who I thought had come from that event. When the political argument escalated, I used indefensible words.
Note Gerber’s reliance here on the same emotional apologia that Seldowitz had used in his defense—she had been disturbed by some unseen and undocumented provocation and was therefore compelled to react so unpalatably.
People like Robin DiAngelo, the famed white guru of antiracism, might claim that Seldowitz and Gerber are experiencing white fragility, a kind of defensive response to racial stress that can manifest in feelings of guilt and shame. But I don’t believe that is the case. To my mind, the kind of demonization of Muslims that both Gerber and Seldowitz brazenly displayed was not a bug, but rather a feature of their political worldview. As liberals have been confronted with actions that diverge from their prescribed norms of acceptable dissent, the conditional nature of their solidarity has become glaringly obvious. Out of the crooked timber of liberals’ humanity no straight thing has ever been made. Or, maybe more succinctly, scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.
This is perhaps a jarring realization to grapple with. Many of us came of age politically during the ascendancy of the Obamas and the era of “Hope” and “Yes we can,” clinging tightly to the hope that liberalism could offer us a reprieve from the right-wing extremism of the Republican Party. But this is the real Democratic Party. The one whose leaders donned kente cloths and performatively kneeled in tribute to the victims of police killings to showcase their anti-Trumpism, while concurrently belittling the calls to defund the police. The one that passed the Crime Bill of 1994 and normalized the War on Terror. The one that expanded drone warfare and authorized extrajudicial killings of Muslim-American teens. The one whose leaders today question the cruelties and proportions of a genocidal war on Gaza, while demonizing anti-war activists as antisemites. This is the real Decmoratic Party, and the likes of Seldowtiz and Gerber merely represent the status quo within this institution.
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Since at least the 1979 Iranian revolution, the US foreign policy establishment has always regarded the Middle East as a troublesome territory. This is partially due to the history of regional resistance to the American empire and their key ally, Israel. As Arun Kundani notes, “a belief in an ‘Islamic threat’ has become a kind of collective unconscious of the US ruling elite.” In the final years of the Cold War, the Americans needed a new ideological bogeyman to maintain the ecosystem of fear that had prevailed upon the country during the postwar years. The Muslims and Arabs seemed like highly suitable candidates.1
With the launch of the War on Terror, Islam was redefined as a specter haunting the world, an inherently fanatical ideology that sought to uproot and eradicate Western civilization. We were suddenly seen as uniquely prone to violence, and the vocabulary of ‘terrorism’ was selectively deployed to associate all representations of Islam and Muslim identities with violence.
Despite isolated instances of resistance, for the most part liberals have worked overtime to sanitize the drive to imperial expansion and violence in the name of defending liberal values. Take the buildup to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where liberal feminists played a central role in manufacturing cultural and political support. In fact, in the years since, some cultural commentators have dubbed the war in Afghanistan America’s first “feminist war,” wherein military conflict was constructed and promoted as women’s rights campaigns that would allow virtuous Westerners to save victimized Middle Eastern women from authoritarian structures. But liberal complicity in the institutional demonization of Muslims goes beyond redefining militarized violence as feminism.
Like most political ideologies, liberalism is in part a cultural project that aims to uphold a certain way of life. In spite of its nominal commitments to inclusivity and cosmopolitanism, the liberal project, in its modern iteration, demands that all members of society integrate into Western values. This is what Bill Clinton was talking about at the 2016 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. What Clinton articulated on that night was a certain widespread liberal anxiety about the emergence of a politically engaged faction within the Democratic Party that is opposed to US hegemony and imperialism. This is why the likes of Rashida Tlaib are so estranged in the mainstream of their own parties. In the perception of average liberals, people like Tlaib are racialized subjects that can articulate a knowledge of how the empire destroys Brown and Black lives. This, however, eschews the liberal expectation of cultural and political subservience and homogeneity.
It is my contention that today’s most zealous Islamphobes are not right-wing extremists. Rather, they are the liberals who spent the last few years performatively condemning Muslim-bashing. This is not, to my mind, a glitch in the liberal operational system. To the contrary, this is what so many Muslims and other racialized communities in the United States (and also in Europe) have long understood be the operating logic of liberal societies. That is why we often feel culturally, politically, and spiritually homeless in the Democratic Party. For decades, this institution has regarded us as interlopers, and has violently insisted that we reformulate our identities to conform to their expectations of the Good Muslim. The latest outbreaks of anti-Muslim vitriol are thereby not aberrations, but reactions to perceived challenges to the status quo.
Audre Lorde famously told us that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Likewise, we cannot hope to dismantle the empire by playing nice with its architects and operators and hoping to ideologically sway them with through civil words and acts. American liberals despise us, the Muslims and our communities, and it is time that we honestly admit as much.
Thus, it is not an accident that Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, first as an article and then in book length, dominates much of the academic and foreign policy discourse of this era.