A quarter century after the September 11 attacks emboldened then-President George W. Bush to launch the “war on terror,” many Americans might like to think they’re wiser than the politicians and pundits who unleashed a flood of anti-Muslim hatred and eroded civil liberties through warrantless wiretaps and racist deportation campaigns.
But some of the most notorious Bush-era advents — like the Department of Homeland Security and the prison colony at Guantánamo Bay — don’t appear to be going anywhere. Nor does the phenomenon of Islamophobia, which is playing a major role in the current political cycle. Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed — who, if elected, would be the first Muslim U.S. senator — has been called a terrorist, a radical Islamist, and a threat to national security, as pro-corporate and pro-Israel super PACs spend millions on ads that paint him as a terrorist sympathizer. In New York City, meanwhile, local media has suggested that the city’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, should not attend the commemoration of the World Trade Center attacks, as if to do so would be an insult to the victims and their families.
“Islamophobia actually becomes more rampant during election season — not necessarily after a terrorist attack, but actually during election season in the U.S.,” journalist Rozina Ali tells The Intercept Briefing. “What’s happened over the last three decades is that Islamophobia has become a feature of American politics. … When you can’t actually discuss the policies, when we’re not willing to engage in facts, it’s really easy to throw racist rhetoric at people.”
“The fight that we’re seeing now is whether we are willing to accept all forms of religion in this country. And as much as I want to say this is just more of what we’ve seen in the past, I think what does frighten me is how quickly we are moving to a place where some governor or some local official might try to outlaw Islam altogether. And mind you, this is even a policy shift from 10 years ago when Trump called for a Muslim ban,” says Ali. “What has been happening recently is that the rhetoric … has been shifting toward, ‘Islam is not a religion, it’s a political ideology.’ This is not a new talking point, but it is becoming institutionalized. There are efforts to make it into law, which is a frightening place to be.”
This week on the podcast, host Akela Lacy speaks to Ali about how anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies are on the rise and have endured, or even worsened, in the post-9/11 world, as well as her new book, “Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America.” Ali shares the first case in which the NSA admitted to spying on a U.S. citizen, Arab American attorney Abdeen Jabara, as well as the story of imam Yassin Aref, a victim of a controversial sting operation who served 15 years in federal prison due to the ambiguous “material support” for terrorism law first passed in the ’90s. It was the same charge used to convict anti-ICE protesters at Prairieland Detention Center to decades in prison this year.
“This was something lot of civil rights lawyers and activists were warning about even back then, because they recognized that this law and this war on terror can be used to attack dissidents and eventually will be used to attack a lot more people than the Muslim community. And that is what we’re seeing now,” says Ali.
“Because we’ve given so much power to the executive branch, because we’ve given so much power to the government over the last 25 years, the government gets to decide who they consider enemies, who they consider terrorists, and what they consider support for terrorism,” says Ali. “The Trump administration can say, ‘I now consider leftists terrorists,’ and unfortunately, there are laws in the books that allow him to do that.”
For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.
Transcript
Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.
Jessica Washington: And, I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.
AL: Jessie, it’s Labor Day weekend. Unless you’re a summer-truther like me, this marks the end of summer for most people. And accordingly, things are taking a hard pivot toward November.
I’m going to run through a few things that caught my eye in the last few days: ICE is planning to pay $5 million to create a national voter database, per reporting from Wired. Nothing to see there, I’m sure.
The Trump administration is also deploying hundreds of Department of Homeland Security agents to conduct a witch hunt for unspecified voter fraud, despite lacking evidence that that’s a real issue.
In Congress, Democrats are considering whether to punish two lawmakers who sided with Republicans this week to advance a key procedural vote. And they’re weighing new rules for the caucus that worry progressives and several other caucuses across the ideological spectrum. But progressives in particular are worried that these new rules, if passed, could ice out the new class of socialists who are on track to take office in January. Separately, but perhaps most importantly, the United Nations said we’ve basically lost any chance to stop the worst of global warming.
JW: OK, I’m really going to avoid making a heat joke. But I will say that August in Washington is officially over and that means not only is the weather getting a little bit cooler, although, I guess, we’ll see. It also means there is a lot more news to cover. Although, I would say it is hard to argue we’ve gotten much rest this last month.
In Massachusetts on Tuesday night, Democratic Sen. Ed Markey easily defeated his challenger, Democratic congressman Seth Moulton. Moulton had run on his relative youth, but was hamstrung by people’s perception that he was both inauthentic and far too conservative for the state. After the 2024 presidential election, Moulton had made this very public appeal to the right, arguing that protecting transgender children had harmed Democrats electorally and that it made them seem out of touch. But as it turned out, from Tuesday night, Moulton ended up being the one who seemed out of touch with his voters in Massachusetts.
In some more somber news, this week marks one year since the Trump administration began carrying out strikes on civilians in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. The Intercept’s Nick Turse reported that the United States has killed 227 civilians in the more than 65 attacks that have been carried out in the name of defeating so-called narco terrorists. There’s this one passage from Nick’s piece on the anniversary that really sticks with me.
“It’s been a year of murders,” said a defense official who was horrified by the first strike and has remained so as the U.S. has targeted scores of so-called “drug boats” in the year since. “The Trump administration has normalized murder.” The official added: “It’s absolutely criminal.”
And then of course, next week marks the 25th anniversary of September 11, so there’s a lot to reflect on when it comes to the legacy of that attack and how it fundamentally reshaped our society.
AL: Yes, and while so much has changed in the last 25 years since 9/11, it also feels like a lot has stayed the same — or, in many cases, gotten worse.
One of the major effects of 9/11 we’re reminded frequently of is the sprawling surveillance apparatus spawned by those attacks as we see its power put to use on almost a daily basis against immigrants, political dissidents, U.S. citizens, and particularly Muslim and Arab communities. We probably know only a small percentage of the destruction the post-9/11 wave of Islamophobia wrought not just in wars around the world, but here at home.
Today, Islamophobia is seeing its own grotesque renaissance, particularly in this year’s midterms. We’re going to get into all of this with our guest today, journalist Rozina Ali. But first, I wonder if you could tell us the latest here, Jessie.
JW: We got a really great example of what you’re talking about this week from CBS News, perhaps unsurprisingly.
AL: The shade. [Laughter]
JW: On Monday, the outlet, now led by conservative commentator Bari Weiss, published a story on Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed saying “Deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.”
Now, the tweets were very innocuous; as many people pointed out, this is a non-story. In two of them, he asked Americans to take Covid-19 as seriously as the terror attacks. But it’s a familiar playbook from the right and their media apparatus: Weaponize 9/11 to stoke Islamophobic fear about a Muslim candidate, rinse, repeat.
You discuss the legacy of 9/11 and how Islamophobia has been weaponized with journalist Rozina Ali. Let’s hear that conversation now.
AL: Yes, joining me now is Rozina Ali, a journalist and contributing writer at New York Times Magazine, a fellow at Type Media Center and at New America, and previously a senior editor at the Cairo Review of Global Affairs. Ali writes primarily about the war on terror, Islamophobia, the Middle East, and South Asia. She has a new book out called, “Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America.”
Rozina, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.
Rozina Ali: Thank you so much for having me. It’s really nice to be here.
AL: Rozina, unfortunately, we are going to start with midterms. We’re approaching the 25-year anniversary of 9/11. You’ve covered the subsequent war on terror and the rise in Islamophobia. A quarter of a century later, Islamophobia is still not just alive and well, but playing a major role in our current political cycle. Why do you think that is?
RA: Over the last 25 years, Islamophobia actually becomes more rampant during election season — not necessarily after a terrorist attack, but actually during election season in the U.S.
What we’re seeing now isn’t unusual. Actually, what’s happened over the last three decades is that Islamophobia has become a feature of American politics.
That said, what we’re seeing now is so rampant, and the anti-Muslim vitriol is just so stark and prevalent, that it is shocking to people who’ve been following this for three decades, like myself.
AL: It feels, as you said, in some ways, like the Islamophobia of 2026 is even more explicit, in some cases, than it was in the post-9/11 world.
We’re seeing a rise in Islamophobic attacks in communities around the country. Three people were killed in an attack on a mosque in San Diego in May. And as you noted, all of this has taken a particularly ugly turn in midterms — specifically the Michigan Senate race, where Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed has been called a “terrorist,” a “radical” Islamist, and a threat to national security.
But we also saw a lot of similar rhetoric aimed at Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race last year. At The Intercept, this cycle, we reported on the record-breaking spending from pro-corporate and pro-Israel super PACs against El-Sayed amounting to about $60 million, much of which paid for ads that painted him as a terrorist sympathizer.
How are you seeing Islamophobia take shape this cycle, and how are people responding?
RA: What’s being thrown at Abdul El-Sayed is actually, again, not unusual. It’s the same playbook that we’ve been seeing. But what is interesting is the way in which the Islamophobic rhetoric somewhat differs between Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed.
What’s interesting with Zohran is that a lot of the vitriol against him was that he was not American. That he was not born in the U.S., and there was a lot of anti-immigration rhetoric thrown at him too. There were calls to denaturalize him, suggesting that he was too foreign in many ways to be mayor of New York City.
You can’t quite do that with Abdul El-Sayed. He was born in Michigan. He was raised there; he went to school there. You can’t actually call for his denaturalization. But what Islamophobes have been doing and what the right-wing has been doing has been suggesting that he has alliances with foreign groups.
Specifically, that his family members have alliances with the Muslim Brotherhood or affiliations with them. The problem is that this has been a strategy that has been used over the past 25 years — suggestions that there are sleeper cells in the U.S., or that there are people who have affiliations with scary groups abroad.
Oftentimes, what the media did was just blare those headlines without really delving deeper into what does it mean to have such an affiliation, if it is true.
I think it’s really interesting that you brought up the San Diego mosque shooting that happened earlier this year, because one of the things that happened soon after was the New York Post did — and I know the New York Post has its flaws, and we should not take it seriously! But their headline when covering this tragic incident was saying, actually, the mosque had affiliations with some of the 9/11 hijackers. They chose to focus on that — as if the anti-Muslim attack was justified in some ways.
Earlier when you asked why is Islamophobia so rampant now, one reason is because for 25 years, anti-Muslim sentiment and rhetoric has been justified over and over again, both by policymakers and media and the public in general.
The New York Post “ chose to focus on that — as if the anti-Muslim attack was justified in some ways.”
AL: Your book touches on this, how the era that we’re living in right now with the attacks — particularly on pro-Palestine students, or surveillance of pro-Palestine activity in response to the genocide in Gaza — echoes the rise of the post-1967 surveillance state targeting Arab communities in the U.S.
A lot of this is encapsulated in the current obsession with leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. We just can’t seem to get away from him being a prominent feature in the news cycle. But I’m going to ask you about this anyway, because I think it’s relevant to the discussion.
In response to a segment on CNN’s State of the Union with Dana Bash that spent six minutes on El-Sayed and Piker, Piker posted on X:
it sounds unbelievably stupid but i have become this media cycle’s “trans athletes” or “migrant caravan.” wild how much supposedly liberal outlets let fox news play the role of news desk editor.
odd how none of these outlets will have me on to interrogate my beliefs directly.
Over recent months, Piker, who has endorsed and campaigned with progressive candidates, has become a prime target of Democrats and Republicans and mainstream news.
Here, he’s pointing out this feature, as you’re describing it, Rozina — a feature, not a bug of our politics. Where rather than focusing on the issues actually impacting people’s lives, there’s this effort to distract attention and channel anger toward a minority group, stoke unfounded fears, and spread lies and disinformation.
This is basically what led to the ICE surge in Minneapolis that killed two protesters, the target in that campaign being the Somali community.
I want to talk more about how you think about this dynamic and particularly why something that is such an obvious distraction can be so effective?
RA: This is what American media does, right? I will say I am part of the American media. We both are.
AL: We all are, yeah.
RA: We all are. There are journalists who are doing incredible work and trying to cut through the noise and trying to actually report on what’s happening.
But what I do find is that a lot of media coverage that revolves around conversations or opinions or talking points becomes so much about one thing.
“ A lot of the reason [Hasan Piker is] getting such vitriol is because of what he says regarding Palestine and Israel.”
This obsession with Hasan Piker actually reflects something that has been a long-standing issue, which is a lot of the reason he’s getting such vitriol is because of what he says regarding Palestine and Israel. Again, not something new.
This has been a problem for decades that the space to have a nuanced conversation about U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine has contracted over many, many years. Certainly after the 1970s, definitely after the Oslo Accords in the 1990s.
But we really saw that much more after 9/11 — that any space to criticize U.S. foreign policy abroad, whether it be in Israel–Palestine, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or even critique the war on terror in general, that space was just contracted, and certainly for Muslims and certainly for Arabs. I think what we’re seeing now is basically a continuation of that.
I do wonder what would happen — if we would be obsessed with Hasan Piker and what he says — if there were more opportunities to actually discuss some of the things that he was bringing up, rather than shut it down.
“The space to have a nuanced conversation about U.S. policy towards Israel and Palestine has contracted over many years.”
AL: The space for this conversation on Israel and Palestine is getting smaller at the same time that it should theoretically be getting wider, right?
Because American sentiment is historically on the side of Palestinians for the first time in recent history. The number of elected officials campaigning on this issue and who have entered Congress over the last six or seven years is at a record high. And yet you see the space not just contracting, but being astroturfed at levels that we’ve never seen when it comes to political spending.
And I think that conversation is often really lost because we are so apt to talk about the historic achievements of this movement in the zeitgeist or public opinion, if you want to call it [that]. But the forces that are working to undermine that movement are stronger than ever at this point.
RA: Absolutely. It is fascinating to me the ways in which the pro-Palestine movement has gained steam over the last decade. Obviously, what happened after October 7 has really changed the momentum and increased the momentum, but there were a lot of attempts to actually shift the conversation from even a decade ago or a decade and a half ago.
A lot of these groups were working on the ground for much longer. It’s just become such a huge part of the public conversation, one, because of what Israel has been doing in Gaza; two, because of the U.S.’s — both Biden and Trump administration’s — full-hearted support for that; and three, because there have been a lot more politicians speaking out about it. There’s actually challenges to this.
One thing to remember is that, yes, basically the pro-Israel lobby has had a lot of money for a long time, but they’ve been throwing money at local elections for the past decade while this movement has been ramping up.
What is interesting to me now compared to 10 years ago, or even, let’s say, after 9/11, is that there is such a discrepancy between what policymakers want or what these interest groups want versus public opinion on the ground, to your point.
“There is such a discrepancy between what policymakers want or what these interest groups want vs. public opinion on the ground.”
That discrepancy is actually something that we need to be paying more attention to. I wish that [the] media would be talking about that a lot more, because if we continue the same policies we have been that the U.S. population does not agree with, we are going to continue to basically worsen distrust in the government, which has been a problem for the last three decades.
There has been waning trust in the U.S. government by the American public, and we have seen how that can be catastrophic. We have seen what happens when people stop losing faith in institutions and in their government. Obviously, this is one policy matter among many, but I do think that gap is something worth paying attention to.
Speaking of the lack of nuanced discussion about Palestine and Israel among U.S. policymakers, a few years ago, I did a profile of Rashida Tlaib for the New York Times Magazine, and I was surprised to learn that the House has about over 300 different caucuses. There is not one that is dedicated to Palestine or Palestinian rights.
That just illustrates how little we are willing to actually talk about this as a policy matter. It’s not shocking to me that the vitriol thrown at Abdul El-Sayed, or even Zohran Mamdani last year, had a lot to do with Islamophobia.
When you can’t actually discuss the policies, when we’re not willing to engage in facts, it’s really easy to throw racist rhetoric at people.
[Break]
AL: I want to talk about what’s been happening in Texas, because I think this is a poignant example of how this has spiraled out of control and seeped into a new form, almost, in 2026. Last year, a promotional video about a Muslim-friendly planned community went viral and sparked a wave of Islamophobic vitriol.
Since then, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law, “Banning Sharia Compounds.” He and Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is also the Republican Senate candidate in Texas, ordered investigations against the development and other Muslim institutions across the state. The Department of Justice even launched an investigation, but closed it without finding wrongdoing, according to reporting from PBS. Now, Republican candidates in the state have been campaigning on “The Islamification of Texas.”
What has been your reaction to all of that?
[Rozina Ali laughs]
AL: You can have a range of reactions. [laughs]
RA: I did! I did go through a range of reactions, which was, “Oh, this is Texas doing its thing again.” Or, “Oh, people hate CAIR. That’s not new.” I hate to say it, but there’s a humor about it, too, because this anti-sharia sentiment is so absurd. One of the first times I heard sharia being used — and I grew up in a Muslim household — the first time I heard the word sharia was through Islamophobes in like 2009. I truly did not know what it meant.
“I don’t think that Greg Abbott or any of the other Republicans who are so staunchly against visible Muslims in Texas can explain what sharia means.”
I don’t think that Greg Abbott or any of the other Republicans who are so staunchly against visible Muslims in Texas can explain what sharia means. They can say it’s Islamic law, which is against Western civilization.
But one, they have not been able to show what it means on a very practical level; and two, they haven’t been able to show how that differs from the ways in which other religious communities practice their own religion in the U.S., or how they seek moral guidance.
Ultimately, what it comes down to, what the fight that we’re seeing now is whether we are willing to accept all forms of religion in this country. And as much as I want to say this is just more of what we’ve seen in the past, I think what does frighten me is how quickly we are moving to a place where some governor or some local official might try to outlaw Islam altogether. And mind you, this is even a policy shift from 10 years ago when Trump called for a Muslim ban.
So within even 10 years, there’s a dramatic shift. We’re not even just saying ban Muslim immigrants from coming into the United States. We are now having conversations where officials want to ban Muslims or Islam altogether.
“We are now having conversations where officials want to ban Muslims or Islam altogether.”
Just a little background: There have long been suspicions about Islamic institutions in this country. Islamic institutions have been surveilled going back to the ’80s and ’90s, and I mean mass surveillance, informants showing up at meetings, talking to and interrogating leaders.
After 2001, there was even an investigation into Muslim chaplains who would visit prisons because some policymakers were worried that they were radicalizing the prison population. There wasn’t really any criminal wrongdoing found actually, but this sense of Muslim institutions are suspicious has been, again, a feature of America for a long time.
But what does worry me is what has been happening recently is that the rhetoric in Texas has been shifting toward, “Islam is not a religion, it’s a political ideology.” This is not a new talking point, but it is becoming institutionalized. There are efforts to make it into law, which is a frightening place to be.
Texas has a huge Muslim population, and I wonder, what does that mean? Does that mean you shut down all the mosques? Does that mean that no Muslim can practice in public?
I have conflicted feelings about the Muslim neighborhood that was being built, and I know it was open to non-Muslims. But I do think what it suggests and what we are seeing more and more in the U.S. is a desire to live in pockets and to live in silos because people feel more comfortable with their community.
That actually is a marked difference from what we decided in the U.S., that we wanted to be a society of pluralism and tolerance, and that’s not what we’re seeing in Texas. You can blame the Muslim community, but very much so I blame a lot of the Islamophobes who not only suggest but say outright that Muslims do not belong in this country.
AL: As you’re talking, I can’t help but think about the irony of trying to frame Islam as a political ideology, while the rise of the Christian far-right as an actual political ideology is completely undergirding the Trump administration and its policy priorities across disciplines — and redirecting attention away from what is a very real manifestation of religion as a political ideology toward this scapegoated community that is not just a distraction, but is causing actual harm.
I wonder, has that come up in your reporting? The parallel between the attacks on Islam and this attempt to paint it as this radical, growing tendril that’s seeping into the American political ideology — while the far-right is actually doing that.
RA: So one of the things I wanted to do in my book is really place this history of Islamophobia in the larger context of what’s happening in American politics and what’s happening in the country. And those two things don’t live in a vacuum.
What was happening to the Muslim community in the U.S. directly affected what was happening in the rest of the country and was affected by it. One of the things that was happening was that even as the media — for years after 9/11, for decades after 9/11 — even as the media covered cases of terrorism convictions or anyone who was charged with terrorism that was related to Muslims, covered the rise of ISIS, covered the rise of Islamic terrorism, it focused much less on the rise of right-wing extremism.
One study put it at over 300 percent more media covered Muslim terrorists than the far-right. What that did was really lull us into thinking that the biggest national security threat we are facing in this country comes from Islamic terrorists, rather than right-wing elements in this country.
It lulled “us into thinking that the biggest national security threat we are facing in this country comes from Islamic terrorists, rather than right-wing elements in this country.”
The other thing that’s happened is that a lot of rhetoric and policies over the past 25 years have actually tried to make Islam different. What’s ironic about what we’re seeing today versus 25 years ago is that after 9/11, the Bush administration tried in rhetoric — and I want to make that clear, in rhetoric, at least — tried to make this a not religious war. They really wanted to resist that this was a clash of civilizations. But the policies and the rhetoric that came out of those initial months after 9/11 actually suggested otherwise.
What happened was that the U.S. government and U.S. authorities and U.S. law enforcement and then eventually “experts” and anti-Muslim hate groups kept positioning Muslims as different or as a group to be suspicious of.
Ultimately, you are creating a religious war by stating the reality of the country in those terms. It’s a natural byproduct of that that Christian fundamentalism would rise as a response to what is considered “foreign elements,” like Islam.
AL: Your new book, “Seasons of Fury,” documents the rise of Islamophobia in the U.S. Can you tell us why you wanted to write this book, and how you started your work on it? Obviously, you’ve been covering this for a long time.
RA: So I was living in Egypt for a couple of years, and I was very much focused on wars abroad and how the war on terror has affected communities around the world. When I returned from Egypt, I was actually thinking a lot about terrorism convictions and how Muslims whose fathers or sons had been sent away to prison for decades, how they were faring.
I wasn’t actually trying to question these terrorism convictions, but while I was looking into these cases and speaking to families — this was around the time of the rise of Trump on the political stage, and I started noticing that there was a lot of anti-mosque activity around the country, not just in New York, but in New Jersey and Tennessee and Chicago, and it was shocking to me that it was happening in both blue and red states.
At the same time, after Trump was elected, people started calling his the most Islamophobic administration in U.S. history. I thought there was already a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment long before Trump came into power. I realized that all those threads that I was observing and starting to look into were actually connected.
One thing I wanted to do with this book is, one, reclaim the history that I think we too often forget about how the Muslim community in the U.S. was targeted and what it went through. But two, I really wanted to situate the Muslim story in the wider American story to explain how we’ve changed.
I really approached this book as an investigative journalist because one of the questions I was really trying to interrogate is: Why is Islamophobia worse now than it was even after 9/11? Why has our country changed so much that we have elected a president who is willing to say, “Let’s ban all the Muslims”? I wanted to really present a history that could explain why we are where we are today.
“Why has our country changed so much that we have elected a president who is willing to say, ‘Let’s ban all the Muslims’?”
AL: Through the stories of four families across eight decades in “Seasons of Fury,” you portray a range of Muslim experiences shaped by relentless suspicion and prejudice.
You write about Arab American attorney Abdeen Jabara, who “learned that the government had amassed an extensive file, covering his organizational affiliations, his travels through the country and abroad, transcripts of phone conversations, and notes from interviews with more than a hundred acquaintances, bank transactions, and summaries of speeches.”
It turned out that the U.S. government had been spying on him since 1967. Tell us more about Abdeen and how he became a target of the government.
RA: Abdeen’s history is so fascinating to me. One of the things that I wanted to do when I started this book was really actually situate Muslims as already part of America.
There’s such a predominant narrative that Islam and Muslims are foreign and they came into this country. I wanted to actually show the opposite, and it was very important to me to begin the book in the United States, rather than with someone’s arrival to the United States. Abdeen was born in 1940 in small-town America, in Michigan.
“There’s such a predominant narrative that Islam and Muslims are foreign and they came into this country. I wanted to actually show the opposite.”
His father, who came from Greater Syria, he was a staunch Republican. He joined the U.S. Army and fought during World War I. He was so patriotic that every Memorial Day he would march in a parade through town. Abdeen became really obsessed with his parents’ homeland; he became obsessed with the Middle East. But what really shook him was what was happening both in the United States and in Israel–Palestine.
So he really came of age during the 1950s and ’60s. He moved to Detroit, and what he saw was an uprising — the 1967 uprising — and he saw police brutality against Black Americans. That same year, there was a war in which Israel basically grabbed more land, more Palestinian land, and those two things really shook Abdeen, and he became very politically active.
He started going to socialist meetings to talk about Palestine. He started to speak at rallies and forums. He helped start a group in the United States that was focused on Palestinian rights. He even took many trips to the Middle East. He was part of the progressive network of National Lawyers Guild. He took a lot of members to the Middle East to meet with Palestinian activists and prisoners and really try to capture what was happening on the ground, bring those facts back to the U.S. to really help shape and influence public opinion and policymakers’ opinion about Palestine, because the U.S. government at that point had backed Israel.
So in 1972, the Munich massacre happens, in which a Palestinian militant group kidnaps and kills the Israeli Olympics team. It caused a huge sensation. It was tragic, and it was blared across national headlines in the U.S. Almost immediately after, Abdeen started to notice that his colleagues, his friends, people he knew in the community were being visited by the FBI.
What immediately came to light was that the U.S. government had started a surveillance program to monitor what it thought were radical elements within the Arab community. This is an operation they called Operation Boulder. Now, ostensibly, the U.S. government said that they were only tackling immigrants, visa holders. It became very clear that it was not just them; it was actually also U.S. citizens of Arab heritage that people were targeting.
He was a U.S. citizen, born, obviously, in the U.S. When Abdeen decided to sue the U.S. government to figure out exactly what they knew and how much they knew because he was suspicious that they had also surveilled him, what he eventually found was that they had been surveilling him since after 1967. So not even since after Munich, but long before then. And that they had shared his information not just with other federal agencies, but also with foreign governments.
AL: This is the first case where the NSA admitted to spying on someone, right?
RA: It was the first case in which the NSA admitted to spying on a U.S. citizen, yes. And it was against an Arab.
“It was the first case in which the NSA admitted to spying on a U.S. citizen.”
One thing that I find also interesting about Abdeen’s case and the entire surveillance program at that time is, Abedin grew up in a Muslim household. FBI and police notes noted that he was Muslim, that his family was Muslim.
They did not surveil him because he was Muslim. They surveilled him because he was Arab — which was the case for his other colleagues, too. They surveilled them because even if they happened to be Muslim, they were surveilled because they were Arab.
After 9/11, it was a similar sort of surveillance — except law enforcement surveilled Muslims because they were Muslims. And that really is a fascinating and damning shift that we see.
When I was doing this reporting and research, I was thinking to myself, I think this might be the first time in U.S. history that the government has targeted a religious group so widely and so systematically, which is, honestly, quite astonishing. And it is something that I wish we would talk about more and really reckon with.
AL: You said you started thinking about this book by thinking about convictions for terrorism charges, and we’ve seen the expansion of charges for “material support” for terrorism in a variety of protest spheres in recent years. I just want to zoom out a little bit because I think most of our listeners are familiar with the way that this apparatus exploded after 9/11.
We know that 9/11 gave way to George W. Bush’s so-called war on terror, the Department of Homeland Security, Guantánamo Bay, the erosion of civil liberties with the Patriot Act and warrantless wiretaps, and the acceleration of the unitary executive theory — resting more unilateral power in the hands of the president.
All of that — all of those institutions — now rest in the hands of Donald Trump and his administration, who, as we know, have proven willing to push the bounds of government surveillance, extrajudicial killings, unilateral wars, and detention of perceived enemies of the state even further. You wrote for The New York Times recently about the Prairieland activists that the government charged with “material support” of terrorism.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how we got there, and how what constitutes terrorism and support for terrorism has evolved over the years.
RA: A lot of the structures and the laws that the Bush administration used to target terrorism were already in place in the United States. They were really expanded and founded during the Clinton administration in the ’90s.
This one specific law that you mentioned, the material support for terrorism, was actually passed in 1994, and then was expanded in 1996, ironically after the Oklahoma City bombing.
What it did was allow the U.S. government to prosecute anyone charged with support for terrorism, either a foreign terrorist organization or support a terrorist activity. The problem was that even in 1996, what “support” meant was so broad and vague.
It was so broad that even some senior administration officials asked the State Department, “Does that mean $25 in dues can be considered material support for terrorism?” The State Department official said, “Yes, actually. I don’t think anyone would prosecute for that, but yes.” So basically, by 1996, we had a really vague and powerful law on the books.
After 2001, prosecutors recognized that they had this really useful law to go after terrorists. One thing to remember is that after 9/11, the guiding star for the U.S. government across the board was prevention. “We have to prevent another attack before it happens,” which means that law enforcement were looking for not just terrorists before they could do something, but potential terrorists, anyone who could become a terrorist. It was a broad mission.
That plus the material support for terrorism law, which was already vague, allowed the U.S. government to basically put a lot of people in jail who were not even connected to a terrorist group or who did not even commit an act of violence or who did not even have particularly detailed plans for violence.
One of the cases I mentioned in the New York Times piece was the case of Yassin Aref, who was an imam in Albany, Kurdish imam. He came as a refugee. This is what’s so fascinating to me about the U.S. war on terror, is that when Yassin Aref came as a refugee, the U.S. considered Kurds their allies. After 2003, they were suspicious of Kurdish militants.
It was during that era, the post-9/11 era, that the U.S. government targeted Yassin Aref using an undercover informant. It’s not that Yassin Aref said, “I want to blow up something,” or “I have a plan,” or “I have a desire to kill someone.”
What actually happened was that the informant loaned money to one of Yassin Aref’s friends. Yasin Aref witnessed that loan. The informant said, “This money came from a foreign terrorist organization.” Yassin Aref did not really understand what this man was talking about and just nodded along. That was one of the pieces of evidence — the strongest piece of evidence — that U.S. prosecutors used to charge him with material support for terrorism.
Yassin Aref ended up in prison for 15 years. This is a case that illustrates, one, that material support was so vague and so broad, it really could mean anything and continues to mean anything. But two, what we consider terrorism has just broadened dramatically. We really have no good definition of what terrorism is.
And this was something that a lot of civil rights lawyers and activists were warning about even back then, because they recognized that this law and this war on terror can be used to attack dissidents and eventually will be used to attack a lot more people than the Muslim community. And that is what we’re seeing now.
We are seeing that because we’ve given so much power to the executive branch, because we’ve given so much power to the government over the last 25 years, the government gets to decide who they consider enemies, who they consider terrorists, and what they consider support for terrorism. And unfortunately, we have the legal backing in the books to back that mission. The Trump administration can say, “I now consider leftists terrorists,” and unfortunately, there are laws in the books that allow him to do that.
AL: They basically said as much claiming that all the socialists are heralding communism, et cetera, et cetera.
RA: Yes, it is one of the more, again, funny if not scary bits about the vitriol thrown at Abdul El-Sayed, is calling him an “Islamic communist.”
It’s so interesting to me that now it’s — I think especially because of the rise of the DSA and socialists in office — basically the right wing is throwing everything at him. And Abdul El-Sayed is not a socialist; he’s said it himself.
AL: He’s not. [laughs] On this show, he’s said that, yes.
RA: Yes. And Zohran Mamdani is a socialist, but it’s the same vitriol thrown at both of them. I think it’s really interesting and actually quite chilling that the rhetoric is starting to join the word “Islamic terrorist” with leftists or with socialists or communists. That actually spells something a lot more nefarious and dangerous for wider American society than just the Muslim community.
“It’s really interesting and actually quite chilling that the rhetoric is starting to join the word ‘Islamic terrorist’ with leftists or with socialists or communists.”
AL: Rozina, we’re going to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us on The Intercept Briefing.
RA: Of course. Thank you so much for having me.
AL: I want to remind everyone that Rozina’s new book is out now. “Seasons of Fury” documents Islamophobia in the U.S..
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