On December 7, 2015, Donald Trump read a statement to an eager audience: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” The “hell” was ad-libbed for emphasis.
Since then, Trump has backpedaled on this position, re-orienting it as a “temporary” ban, then later as a policy of immigration suspension and most recently, a call for “extreme vetting from certain areas of the world.” On one hand, we could flag the Muslim Ban stance as just another one of Trump’s dangerous antics. Alternatively, we could view this policy as a reflection of a culture that stems beyond Trump as an individual to American society as a whole – a phenomenon known as “War on Terror culture.”
The term “War on Terror culture” was coined by Moustafa Bayoumi, author of This Muslim American Life, who writes about how being a Muslim American today often means to exist in a contradictory space between “exotic and dangerous, victim and villain, simply because of the assumptions people carry about you.” War on Terror culture inflicts harm on various groups in various ways, but what it does most notably – apart from incite hate and fear based off of misrepresentative images – is provide the vocabulary for American society to justify violating human rights in the name of national security.
The War on Terror is hyper-visible. Holding uncharged men at Guantanamo, advocating for torture and pursuing unwarranted surveillance on Muslim Americans – all under the guise of national security – are just a few manifestations. But what exactly is War on Terror culture? We all have learned about the power of Cold War propaganda. From James Bond to “War of the Worlds,” the entertainment industry, along with American legal and political arenas, held patriotic images of loyal Americans up against stereotypical forms of vaguely-defined, Soviet or “Soviet-like” foreign foes. Today, we see the same culture of paranoia driving foreign policy in everything from Showtime’s “Homeland” to Trumpian Islamophobic rhetoric. Unlike Soviet bloc immigrants in the US during the Cold War, Muslim Americans are cast off not only because of abstract political ideology, but also in terms of their cultural, religious and ethnic ties as well. The Muslim American community bears the obvious weight of War of Terror culture at home. Meanwhile, anti-Muslim fear-mongering inflicts tangible consequences on drone-targeted villages and detainment centers abroad. The Islamophobic outpourings from War on Terror culture represent a clear and pressing threat to the human rights of a diverse group of Muslims – not to mention to non-identifying individuals wrongly grouped into the media’s homogenizing image of Muslims.
The first Amendment of the Constitution entitles individuals to freedom of religion. Articles 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 12 and 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the US has ratified, outline everything from one’s right to protection against discrimination, torture, unequal protection under the law, arbitrary arrest, invasions of privacy or interference with peaceful religious observance. In what way do the social and political outputs of the War on Terror culture do anything but violate these clearly-defined rights?
Bayoumi offers a chilling reflection on the dangers of War on Terror rhetoric in American politics: “Republican candidates for president speak as if the rest of the world can’t hear them. In fact, I think a lot of our policies, whether it be local law enforcement or at the federal level, also speak as if the rest of the world can’t hear them. But the rest of the world, especially with the spread of social media, is definitely listening.” In a world with everyone listening – from children growing up feeling as though their own country does not want them, to abusive officials at detention centers feeling that their psychologically torturing use of high-volume American music is somehow a “patriotic act” – War on Terror is not just a culture, but a cult of hate that must be recognized as such. If everyone is listening to this election, then I wonder how much it will take to get Americans to hear beneath Trump’s hate speech the cries of human rights suffocating.