Lists

An Islamophobia industry compiled lists of Muslims in America. Now those lists can feed a deportation engine. PLUS! If Trump declared himself a neocon, what would be different? 

Edited by Sam Thielman

MORE THAN A DOZEN years ago, a group I had never heard of, Citizens for National Security, accused thousands of Muslims in the United States of being potential terrorists. Thanks to disgraced Iraq War officer-turned-Congressman Allen West, they got space in the basement of the Cannon House Office Building to make this accusation, and so I went to their event. 

The bases for such incendiary charges were, unsurprisingly, not criminal activity, but nebulous, asserted connections to the global Islamist Muslim Brotherhood organization, made via "open-source" discovery, according to group founder Peter Leitner. Innuendo and an internet connection substituted for rigor, as should be obvious from the fact that more than a dozen years later, Leitner's warnings of "a fifth column movement, a subversive movement intended to help undermine the United States as a secular government, as a Judeo-Christian society" never resulted in anything. 

When we spoke, Leitner conceded to me that the org-chart of his accusations resembled "a plate of spaghetti." But that only proved to him how cunning the Muslim Brotherhood were at concealing their tracks. While Leitner said that it would be "irresponsible" to release his list publicly, he told me he had a target in mind for it: "someone in government [or] law enforcement." 

Leitner's group was hardly alone. Throughout the War on Terror, right-wing groups often claimed to have compiled damning evidence that this-or-that American Muslim, whether a prominent civil-rights figure or someone no one ever heard of, was a terrorist, or close enough to one to merit the curtailment of their employment, their freedoms or even their citizenship.

Friend of FOREVER WARS Sami al-Arian experienced it firsthand. Even before Sami was caged, the University of South Florida fired him, using language that we might expect to hear from Columbia University today: "In order for us to maintain a climate for academic freedom, we must be able to assure our students, our faculty, our staff and our visitors that USF is a safe place for the pursuit of ideas and free expression." Ultimately, despite his acquittal at trial of the most serious offenses he was charged with, Sami was deported.

Often such organizations referred to Muslims inside the United States as part of a shadowy, secret network called a "civilization jihad," based on a reach of a read of a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood document. You can read about all this in chapter five of REIGN OF TERROR. The point was to cast a pall of permanent suspicion over your Muslim neighbor, rendering their mere presence a threat to your safety. 

On Wednesday, before I saw the news that the Department of Homeland Security had detained a Georgetown postdoc named Badar Khan Suri, I got an email from the Middle East Forum, a prominent civilization-jihad organ, boasting that Khan had been taken into custody. "This follows an article published by the Middle East Forum (MEF) exposing Suri’s repeated praise of Hamas terror and relation by marriage to a senior figure in the designated terrorist organization," they gloated. 

As it happens, that senior figure in Hamas is Ahmed Yousef, who earlier this month said that "Oct. 7, in my opinion, was a terrible error." But the truth is no defense and bringing up such complications risks missing the bigger picture: that Suri has committed no crime. Georgetown's Alwaleed Center, where Suri taught, observed that "like Mahmoud Khalil before him, [Suri] was arrested in the context of a campaign by the Trump Administration to destroy higher education in the United States and punish their political opponents." 

Ever since the War on Terror began, there has been receptivity in U.S. law enforcement, intelligence and the military for the perspective that Islam, rather than any specific violent organization like al-Qaeda, is in and of itself a national-security threat. Whether explicitly espoused or not, that presumption undergirded efforts like the NYPD's post-9/11 "rakers" program that spied on New York Muslim businesses, mosques, and community centers, and the FBI's Project Pinpoint that mapped Muslim neighborhoods. And they were supplemented by groups like Citizens for National Security and the Middle East Forum that kept political pressure on law enforcement and politicians to maintain such constraints on Muslim civil rights. 

But those efforts have never encountered fewer internal frictions than they do right now. Nor have they had the opportunity to scale up that they have right now. The lists of Muslims over the past generation, for instance, didn't typically contain indictable information. But in an era when the Department of Homeland Security asserts the authority to deport someone for "activities aligned to" a terror group—and adopts a detain/deport-first-and-let-God-sort-out-citizenship-afterward posture—the lists don't even need to. 

Devoted to the barbaric goal of mass deportation, the Trump administration is vastly more open to receiving and using lists of scary Muslims than at any previous moment in the War on Terror. Betar, a thuggish Zionist organization that likes to threaten Peter Beinart and Norman Finklestein, boasts about putting Mahmoud Khalil's name on the Trump administration's radar and vows that it has many more names to follow Khalil's. One of them belongs to the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha. Poetry is terrorism, depending on the language it's written in. 

On one level, the lists are a weak supplement to the artificial intelligence that the State Department is set to wield for the revocation of student visas. But efficiency isn't the goal here. Silence is. The point of making and declaring lists of people to be fired, expelled, arrested or deported for the causes they advocate—let alone for who their in-laws are—is to make everyone else who supports those causes think long and hard before making themselves visible. There is no cancel culture quite like the War on Terror.

AS HE ESCALATES the sea-air bombing campaign in Yemen to backstop Israel's renewed genocide in Gaza, President Trump is once again looking to hunt the white whale of the War on Terror. "Iran has to give up its program in a way the entire world can see… the full program. Give it up, or there will be consequences," Mike Waltz, Trump's national security adviser, told CBS, adding that "this is coming to a head." Earlier this month, Trump wrote Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamanei a letter proposing nuclear talks—but, since Trump was the one who broke the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the letter appears to be little more than a threat. "I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing," Trump summarized. It sure is giving Fire And Fury.

And perhaps it ends with the kind of overly personalized and ultimately futile negotiations that Trump pursued with Kim Jong-Un. But after Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu's Neo-Neocon Summer 2024, there is wind in the sails of the old neocon dream of a decisive military confrontation with Iranian power in the Middle East. (Or, given its broader purchase in the "national security community," maybe let's adapt a Steve Bannon phrase and call it Neocon-Plus.) Daniel Larison, who sees "a pretext for war" developing, notes ruefully that fears of starting a war with Iran were supposed to be the reason Mike Pompeo was kept out of the Trump-restoration Pentagon.

But it turns out Pompeo isn't necessary, as the coalescing Trump II foreign policy unambiguously intensifies the post-9/11 Forever Wars. It isn't even bothering to posture as their alternative anymore. REIGN OF TERROR readers already know what I'm going to say here, but the War on Terror is a political mechanism that fuses neocon and nativist agendas, at home and abroad, and offers them power. That is why the justification the Trump people are offering for practically every aspect of their security agenda has to do with terrorism. To say nothing of their defense of Teslas. 

In the Middle East, we are seeing an explicit U.S. embrace of Israel ethnically cleansing Palestine and annexing the West Bank. Trump is building on a foundation Biden laid for him for an attempt at a broader military rollback of Iranian regional power. This time, there's no pretense at laundering the exercise of power through bullshit about making Arabs and Iranians freer. But other than that, this looks a whole lot like the triumph of a neocon agenda. 

Then, look at the adjunct operations Trump is pursuing here in the United States: turning noncitizens who speak out against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide into political prisoners or deportees. Academics are again being defamed as terrorists. My friend David Klion is writing a book about neoconservatism's enduring relevance, and Trump is certainly giving David material by suppressing O.G. neocon targets like Columbia University and academic freedom, and doing so under the cynical banner of protecting of Jewish safety. 

Meanwhile, the apparatus of counterterrorism is so deeply interwoven with the apparatus of deportation that the capture of migrants for caging in El Salvador is better understood as a rendition than a deportation back to a country of origin. Not for nothing does the name of Nayib Bukele's prison translate to Terrorism Confinement Center. Through counterterrorism, new vistas of the possible open wide, for both the nativist and the neocon.

Were Trump an avowedly neocon president, the distinguishing change in policy would concern Ukraine, not the Middle East. And while mass deportation wasn't ever neoconservative catechism, as you'll see in the column of David's I linked above and in his forthcoming book, several areas of Trump's domestic agenda have neocon antecedents as well. 

My inclinations are not to focus overly on these rigid and somewhat academic distinctions, since politics is usually syncretic in practice, and because categorization matters a whole lot less than the Palestinians and Yemenis dying from U.S. weaponry; the assault on basic political freedoms at home that is indistinguishable from the assault on migrants; and, potentially, the many Iranians, Israelis and Americans who will die in a war between the U.S. and Iranian coalitions. But in that agenda, you see a simultaneous triumph of the impulses of both nativists and neocons, to the point where the distinction between them is probably better understood as having more to do with competing factions than competing policies. The War on Terror has made it so.

HOSSAM SHABAT OF AL-JAZEERA is the latest journalist killed in Gaza by Israel. His colleague Tareq Abu Azzoum said that the IDF on Monday "targeted [Shabat's] vehicle" without prior warning. Shabbat was only 23 years old, and his slaying comes hours after Israel apparently also killed Palestine Today's Mohammed Mansour, in Khan Younis. The Committee to Protect Journalists, which condemned the killings of Shabat and Mansour, have tallied an astonishing 170 journalists killed in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and Lebanon since Oct. 7, 2023. Almost all of those killings have been greeted with silence by major U.S. news outlets. Journalism is not a crime and the truth cannot be killed.

IF YOU HAVE A TATTOO THAT KIND OF LOOKS to the Department of Homeland Security like a Tren de Aragua tattoo, you're going to a torture prison. War on Terror-level standards truly are in effect. 

FAIR WARNING: This may be our only edition this week. I have book-writing stuff and IRON MAN-writing stuff I need to get done on a child-care-constrained schedule, as well as other stuff for unannounced projects. Luckily, I wrote you two 700-800 essays above, so I'm hoping you won't feel shortchanged. If so, please accept a picture of the backdrop Refused chose to play in front of at the Brooklyn Paramount on Friday, as it's taken from Aaron Bushnell's last words.

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! Bulletproof is also selling signed copies of my IRON MAN run with Julius Ohta, so if you want those, buy them from Flatbush's finest! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.