How the "War on Terror" Became a War against Muslim Americans
Date
2023-03-17
Authors
Aase, Vanessa
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Abstract
September 11th, 2001, radically transformed United States political discourse and Muslim Americans’ lives. The attack prompted the George W. Bush administration to pass laws that infringed on citizens’ rights and intensified a tendency toward an effectively imperial presidency. Further, Bush “othered” Muslims by implicitly depicting them as hostile to American “freedom,” thereby building public support not just for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan but also for the 2003 launching of the Iraq War. Against the backdrop of the “war on terror” and the disastrous Iraq War, some Republican Party members began to spread rumours that the subsequent President, Barack Obama, was Muslim, thereby depicting him as an outsider whose un-American identity made him unfit for the presidency. Moreover, disenchantment with the Republican Party establishment fostered the conservative populist Tea Party movement. This trend influenced Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign in which he framed himself as an anti-elitist political outsider who would put “America First” by standing against groups deemed antithetical to American values (Muslims and immigrants more broadly). Overall, the global “war on terror” coincided with the normalization of Islamophobia within US politics, as the effective dehumanization of Muslims helped mobilize the public for war.
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Keywords
islamaphobia, 9/11, war on terror, United States, Bush, Trump