How to Resist America's Culture of Islamophobia

Dr. Omar Suleiman is a distinguished Islamic scholar, civil rights activist, and President of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research. Today he joins to discuss the deep roots of Islamophobia in American politics and the moral consequences of U.S. foreign policy—particularly the genocide in Gaza. Dr. Suleiman explains how systemic dehumanization shapes American policy and what can be done to fight back. You can find the interview on the Current Affairs podcast here and videos here.

Nathan J. Robinson 

We are in a political moment that is ugly and bleak. I don't think there's really any way of disguising that or sugarcoating it. Donald Trump, who is a rancid bigot, has returned to the White House, and I think a lot of people are feeling—a lot of progressive people are feeling—very despondent and don't know what to do. How are you feeling about this particular political moment?

Omar Suleiman

In terms of the bleakness of the moment, from my perspective, every single part of me is disturbed by the reign of Donald Trump—Donald Trump 2.0. And obviously, American Muslims, we've been under attack. This was a man who came out of the gate the first time—Trump 1.0—with the Muslim ban. We took to the airports as unified coalitions to reject that executive order, which left people stranded in airports across the country and was just a horrifying introduction of his presidency to the American Muslim community. On top of that, obviously, there was a shooting that many people don't remember, a terrorist attack in Quebec against the Muslim community. A gunman killed six worshipers because he was afraid that, based on Trump's fearmongering, Muslims that weren't going to be allowed into the U.S. would go to Canada. And that's how Trump 1.0 started. So there's that element.

Obviously, Trump has a cabinet of neocons that will target the American Muslim community in every way institutionally. We do have a large immigrant contingent of the American Muslim community, even though our largest contingent is the indigenous African American Muslim community. But still, they’re targeting the immigrant population, and so there's a lot of fear about what that's going to mean for people.

I'm also a Palestinian American. My parents are Palestinian refugees, so I have relatives that have been killed in this genocide in Gaza. I have other relatives that are stranded in multiple places in the West Bank, which is starting to look like Gaza with some of the recent incursions. Trump is signing off on the most extreme elements of aggression against the Palestinian people. That's how he's coming out the gate. He's seeking to escalate the erasure of the Palestinian people. And so everything about him right now and what he represents is deeply problematic.

I think that he represents many of the fractures that we have in our American society, the demonization of the other, and has turned that into an ugly political momentum that should actually cause America to look in the mirror and say, what really are we? We'd like to believe that this was just some random space of Twitter, now X, where you had this type of bigotry that was so potent and profoundly embedded in the hearts and minds of people—we like to think it was a small quarter of the internet, but it's not a small quarter of the internet. Let's face it. At the Super Bowl, they put Donald Trump on the screen, and he gets massive cheers. The polls show the support that he has garnered in the American public, and I think it's important for us to recognize that. We shouldn’t be reductionist, [as if] people voted for Donald Trump because they're all racist bigots. But we should talk about some of the failures of the Democratic Party that led to Trump being able to exploit genuine frustrations. But many of those who voted for Trump and who pushed Donald Trump onto the American people and onto the world do not mind many of the things that he says about other people, including much of the legislation that he will push domestically and globally against people, especially right now the Palestinian people, which is something that weighs heavily on my heart and mind.

Robinson

Yes. You mentioned dehumanization, and what people can live with and are willing to overlook, even if they're not racist. I recently did an article on Pete Hegseth, the new Defense Secretary, and I read his book American Crusade. And in it, what struck me was the way he talks about Muslims. If someone talked this way about Jews, or they talked this way about Christians, we would recognize that they were a kind of Nazi-level bigot. I'll just quote a couple of the things he says. 

“Islam is not compatible with Western forms of government.” “Some countries want to stay free so they fight back against Islam's spread.” 

He dismisses the notion of a moderate or peaceful Islam. 

He says the United Kingdom is done for because cities have Muslim mayors. He says, as Muslim birth rates have grown, countries that permit Muslim immigration are being destroyed. 

There are hundreds of passages like this. And I think what disturbed me so profoundly is that, again, if we applied it in the context of other groups, it would be immediately obvious that this was a very extreme, toxic form of bigotry at the highest level of government. 

Suleiman

Yes. Look, one of the things about Islamophobia is that it's the most permitted form of bigotry in the mainstream in the United States. And I would argue that could be statistically proven because when's the last time you saw an anchor fired for anti-Palestinian bigotry? When's the last time you saw a journalist or a professor let go because of the things that they say about the Muslim community?

You have to understand that this is the culmination of multiple factors. One of them is that the Muslim community is racialized. We're a racialized minority even though we have white Muslims. Number two, we're not just “brown” in the American imagination and in the Orientalist framing of the Muslim world—and the immigration element of our community exaggerated—but we're also supposedly all carrying this dangerous ideology that makes us inherently suspicious. And so you can't trust a Muslim, even your really nice Muslim doctor—and Muslims are disproportionately represented in the medical [work]force—your really nice Muslim neighbor, the Muslim that you know at work or at school. There's a visible presence of Muslims across the country now. But you can't trust their smile, you can't trust their niceness, because they carry in them this regressive ideology to where, if they get the opportunity, they will harm you. They're just waiting for the moment to harm you.

And so there's the racialized element, and then there's the ideological element. That type of framing of Islam and the Muslim world has justified the crusades of the United States. If we really want to peel this back, you go back to the Bush administration and to the language that was used by Rumsfield and Ashcroft as they were embarking on these adventures into the Muslim world. They openly used crusader language. They use this type of language to erase the one million-plus victims of their Iraq War from the American public. The framing is that these are people too barbaric to be dealt with by normal human policy, and so the only way that you can deal with these people is to exterminate them. That's the level of dehumanization that exists here. Now we see how that's working in Gaza and anti-Palestinian bigotry, which is an extension of Islamophobia because it traffics in Islamophobia, even though Palestinians are not just Muslims there, there's a large Christian minority [also].

Robinson

Yes, secular Palestinians, and there are Palestinian Christians.