"You have this open Islamophobia by members of the United States Congress.
Whenever something like this happens, when 9/11 happened, the US decided to suspend its own civil liberties in order to crack down on Muslims.
Muslims were abducted, arrested, and tortured.
In her book “Thomas Jefferson's Quran”, Denise A. Spellberg writes that usually you can see what would happen to everyone else in the country based on what's happening to Muslims at the time. Early on, for example, Muslims became a sort of extreme example of people to whom tolerance would be expanded to.
Like I mentioned, Protestants had lived with Catholics and Jews and knew them.
However, they had never lived with Muslims and didn't actually know them very well.
Then when Muslims were granted citizenship rights in the 20th century, that also solidified citizenship rights for non-white Americans.
Then when Muslims were abducted without due process after 9/11, it opened the door to the current ICE raids and people being deported to El Salvadorian prisons.
I find it funny that when people are abducted by ICE or other departments of the US government without due process, people often say, "Oh, this is not the America that I grew up in."
But the truth is that it's exactly the America that they grew up in. Mosques and individual Muslims were surveilled.
Their civil liberties were defiled and many were detained without due process. Some were even tortured.
All of this in the same United States some 25 years earlier. So no, this isn't new in the United States. The truth is that Muslims have always been considered half Americans who should not get equal protection under the law.
I once read somewhere, and I can't remember where, but I do agree with it, that Muslims have this sort of weird overlap of minority problems in the United States.
Like African-Americans, Muslims often get the short end of the stick when dealing with the law.
Like Jewish Americans, Muslims are often targets of hatred based on their religious identity.
Islamophobia and anti-semitism are quite similar in nature.
After all, like Asian-Americans, Muslim loyalty is always in question. Muslims are imagined as being loyal to a foreign power.
Like, for example, when China was associated with COVID 19 pandemic, Asian-Americans were victims of hate crimes.
When the United States went to war against Japan during the Second World War, Japanese Americans were thrown into internment camps.
Like Italian Americans, certain Muslims, uh, particularly Syrian and Turkish Muslims, also had to fight for their “whiteness” and their citizenship rights.
Like many South American immigrants, Muslims are imagined as a horde of people rushing in away from areas of conflict.
When you say that a group of people who are Americans are in fact not American and hence do not deserve the basic rights that are insured to citizens, you are saying that the rights of citizens are in fact conditional. Someone doesn't just have to be a citizen, but they have to be American in the way that you think that they should be.
These days, it's white, anti-woke, cis, Protestant Christians.
Muslims are the easiest people, I think, to call an American, at least from among American citizens.
Hence, a Muslim's loyalty to the United States is always under question.
During the primary debate, all the candidates were asked where they'd like to take their first foreign visit after being elected mayor.
While most said Israel, Mamdani said that he would like to stay in New York and meet people there.
The moderators then changed their question, asking Mamdani if he'd visit Israel, to which he said that he wouldn't.
He would rather work with Jewish New Yorkers to address their problems.
The moderators then changed their question again and asked him if he believes that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state.
They were trying to mine for an answer that could be labeled anti-semitic.
You can bet that if anyone else on that stage had said that they won't go to Israel, they wouldn't have gotten those questions.
All Muslim candidates do get questions like these.
They have to denounce Hamas or Terrorism in general.
They have to condemn 9/11.
Personally, I don't even agree with Mamani when he said that Israel has a right to exist.
Even as an equal state, it does not have any right to exist.
So ultimately, I would say that it's easier to imagine an end to the United States than it is to imagine a Muslim becoming president.
And if he does, we would for sure see civil war.
I can't even imagine a Jewish president anymore.
The United States has inherited a long history of panic around Islam and Muslims."
(Al Muqaddimah: There Will Never be a Muslim President of the United States)
@therapeuticfairy @themousefromfantasyland @the-blue-fairie @princesssarisa @rayatii
