On Feb. 18, 2012, the NYPD found itself at the center of a controversy with Muslim college students when the Associated Press reported that NYC police had been monitoring Muslim student groups both within the city limits at schools like City College of New York and outside of the city. Muslim students at Ivy League schools such as Yale and University of Pennsylvania—well beyond the jurisdiction of the NYPD—were also monitored. In one reported case, the NYPD sent an undercover agent to accompany a Muslim student group’s rafting trip, in which he observed and reported the group’s religious activities back to the department.
Think about that for a minute. The very fact that the NYPD would think it prudent to document the group’s religious activity—for example, the number of times and how the students prayed and discussed religious topics—equates religious practice alone with possible terrorist activity. Indeed, further reports by the AP show instances in which Muslim communities, such as the NYC Shi’ite community, had been targeted for monitoring based singularly on religion. This is extremely disturbing given the ubiquitous stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs in American life.
Nevertheless, the surveillance program has been defended by NYC Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. As the AP reported, a police spokesman, Paul Browne, justified the attention paid to Muslim student associations (MSAs) by providing a list of 12 former members of MSAs that had been arrested or convicted on terrorism-related charges in the United States and abroad.
Well, hold the phone. Twelve people in the United States and abroad? Well, if that ain’t an epidemic, especially given that the Muslim Students Association has almost 600 chapters in the United States and Canada, representing the 2.6 million American Muslims, of 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide—nearly one-fourth of the world’s population. And the NYPD presumes that simply identifying as a Muslim—especially an educated Muslim—should qualify one for extra concern as a potentially dangerous “other.”
I call shenanigans.
Again, we’re talking about millions of people in the United States and nearly one-fourth of the people worldwide. Doesn’t it seem the slightest bit absurd to assume that 1.5 billion people, in all their complexity and nuances, can be considered in one broad stroke as possible terrorists? And how has it happened that such a sweeping generalization of an entire group of people can be seriously entertained, of which the NYPD’s surveillance program is not really an isolated case? The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent war on terror have definitely exacerbated a wide stereotyping and profiling of Muslim people—who are, by the way, one of the most ethnically diverse religious groups in the United States—but they have definitely not created the prejudice.
Muslims and Arabs—categories that are distinct but nonetheless conflated in American discourse—are one of the most ruthlessly berated groups in American media, especially in Hollywood films. “Arabs are the most maligned group in the history of Hollywood,” says Dr. Jack Shaheen in the 2006 documentary Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (based on Dr. Shaheen’s book of the same title). “They are portrayed as basically sub-human.” The documentary goes to point out that Arab characters in Hollywood films have and do resemble historical anti-Semitic renderings of Jewish people: Arab characters often take on the repugnant stereotypes of the fetishistic lust for money, cruel business practices, incompetence, barbarism, sexual exoticism in Arab women or sexual obsession with white women in Arab men, to name a few. “These images have been with us for over a century,” says Dr. Shaheen, citing films from the silent era to more recent blockbusters like True Lies (1994), Disney’s Aladdin (1992) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). And these images are often hidden in plain sight, so normalized as the American image of Arab and Muslim people that they seem not to register as offensive.
This cultural history of American stereotyping of Muslims is of course distinct from the NYPD surveillance controversy, but I think it helps show how deep-seated our stereotypes of Muslims really are, and how we have a long tradition by which counterterrorism policies such as the NYPD surveillance can be rationalized. When one-fourth of the world’s population is routinely dehumanized in the American imagination, it’s no surprise that peaceful Muslims can be so easily conflated with its minority element of radicals, as if 1.5 billion people can be considered as one monolithic—even “exotic”—entity.
And until we smash this image of the Muslim “other” in our own popular culture, we won’t be able to solve the national security issues that the NYPD surveillance program is supposed to be in service of. Sure, issues of religious extremism are of real concern in the Muslim world—as they are and have been in other groups, too—but these realities must be considered in their full complexity, without lumping Arabs and Muslims as backwards “proto-terrorists.” And this is exactly what the NYPD has done by surveilling Muslims based on religious practice: they’ve deemed an entire religious and ethnic group potentially dangerous. That subverts the First Amendment. What’s more, that’s racism.
Students of all religious stripes should repudiate the dehumanizing logic of the NYPD monitoring of Muslim students, and Americans should come to terms with the reality of our own dehumanizing stereotypes of Muslims in popular culture. The first step? Let’s start treating Muslims in America and abroad as human beings.
Mikey Angelo Rumore can be reached at michealangelorumore@gmail.com.