on american islamic relations hosted this conference about islamophobia at metropolitan state university in st. paul, minnesota. a panel of historians, authors, and community activists discuss the history and intersection of islamophobia, anti-semitism, and white supremacy. this runs one hour, 20 minutes. >> welcome to this first panel, this first breakout section on the intersections of his phobia, anti-semitism, and white nationalism/white supremacy. nationalism/white supremacy. i am a professor of history and asian american studies at the university of minnesota. i directed the immigration history research center and i just want to say, this conference is phenomenal. it does not exist in many other places. it does not exist in many other places. it brings together amazing scholars and experts nationally

and internationally, pioneers in the ways in which we understand both the consequences, the roots of islamic phobia, and also in a really acceptable and community engaged environment. i just want to express my foritude to the organizers putting on the third iteration of this conference. spend we are going to some more time thinking about the intersections of hate, really. i think we got a good beginning of some of that conversation. one of the takeaways that i got the earlier session is the obvious point, that islamophobia does not exist in a vacuum. i am a historian. all the historical notes, that we have been here before, this is another iteration or

forms of of earlier state sanctions as well as acts of hate and violence. it really resonated with me. i want to elaborate a little bit more. the professor says this is racism, a form of racism. there are many different definitions of islamophobia. part of the conversation is is it irrational? yes. is it expressed rationally and legitimated and justified, normalized, in very sanctioned ways? the more we think about islamophobia as a system of hate, as an ideology, and as a form of discrimination, i think that it moves us a little bit further in how we can better understand its intersections and

its impact. is whiteey point here supremacy and white nationalism undergirding all of the systems of oppression in the united states and much of the world. it has been a system of white supremacy. it is important to remember that the first others in the united native americans and african americans and the ways in which we interacted with group -- other group that came after them was always in relation to where they of ourthis hierarchy ways of knowing whether they were savages or violent, fit to be citizens, fit to become americans. we engage inus, as this discussion about intersections today, i would like us to think about that historical foundation as well. panelists you

have already been introduced to. we are much too humble. since i have their full biographies, i'm am going to take the liberty of telling you a little bit more about them. associater right, the professor in iowa. a former adviser on islamophobia at the u.s. state department and washington, d.c. and other -- in washington, d.c. and author of two books on islamic phobia. presumed guilty, why we should not ask muslims to condemn terrorism. to him is dr. hudson hatem bazian. he founded the islamophobia research and education project at the center for race and

gender at uc berkeley. when i teach about islamophobia in my classes at the university of minnesota, i go directly to this website. not only for its amazing research reports which have been produced, but also a really accessible and theoretically grounded definition of what islamophobia is and its frameworks. launched the islamophobia studies journal, another go to in the study of islamophobia. it is the only peer-reviewed academic journal on the subject and he is founder and professor of islamic law and theology at the first accredited muslim is liberal arts college. alum of the

university of minnesota worked as a community organizer. she is located in st. paul and currently serves as lead trader for educational initiatives linking social justice issues and action. is a law professor at the university of arkansas, school of law, and affiliated faculty at uc berkeley. lawocuses on constitutional . but he is best known right now for two projects. one is his amazing book, american islamophobia, understanding the recent rise of fear. he has been one of the most important sources of information, insight, and compassion in the wake of the and newt attack zealand. if you go to twitter and look ves, you will see

the amazing work that he has done in showcasing and redirecting our attention, the world's attention, to the victims. is an amazing panel. we are so fortunate to have these scholars and activists with us. my plan is to open up the minuteson for 10 to 15 on theseng as he wants intersections, and then my goal is to leave more time for questions and answers at the end so wese formal comments can start having a conversation with many of you who i think have lots of things to say. so do i have a volunteer for who would like to go first in our panel of english speakers -- of distinguished speakers?

please start. lauren: everyone, can you. ? -- can you hear me? it is good to be in the room with everyone interested in learning about this and figuring out what we do about it. a lot of people have been doing this as lifelong work. i will just share some perspectives from jewish community action and my own personal information. have been working on different social justice issues in the twin cities community. looked atnd of always this thing from the frame of weight privilege and how that impacts people and what is the role for white people to step into and do things? since the last presidential election, we have been realizing that this is much more systemic

than we maybe realized before and we kind of changed our approach to looking at both anti-semitism and islamophobia stemming from a reality of colonial inheritance. colonial continuation. and seeing how the combination of white nationalism and christian hegemony have kind of positioned this hateful rhetoric, this kind of systemic way of looking at different groups of people and making them of others and dividing them from people who share interests. we are looking at the ways that white nationalism is trying to divide and separate us. and rejecting that an understanding that one is an intentional behavior in order to stop people who naturally should be in alliance with each other from coming together and resolving some of these huge nationwide and worldwide issues.

salam alekum. thank you for bringing us to such an important discussion and thank you for welcoming me here. he is a graduate from uc berkeley. our professor that supervised the thesis is the person in the center for race and gender that says we need to do work with islamophobia. we need to create a project and program for gender and japanese background. think of the japanese community having gone through the internment and recognizing the need to address the problem of islamophobia. these are connections that take place in a real sense of peoples experiences being extended to the contemporary period.

a full course on islamophobia, deconstructing berkeley.ia at uc the question is, when do we start the question about islamophobia? is not about 9/11. it is not about the turn of the 20th century. we begin with the inquisition. because the construction of what we think of being white and christian, the construction of wasept of europe at a time achieved by trying to other two large groups that were present in europe, the muslim and jewish community, so you could not construct the european worldview at the time without actually coming into other ization and the expulsion of muslims and jews and a whole systematic

inquisition that targeted religious identity. when we think about islamophobia and racism, it is to govern and control the bodies and space of muslims and jews in europe. and there was a hall structure for the inquisition. dressf the jews could not in their normal religious garb in anyuld not engage type of practice that would be religiously inclined like ritual bathing, kosher and halal. had pork socuisine that you were no longer upholding the requirements against pork consumption. they were converted to christianity. they were finally expelled in 16

ow09. the inquisition lasted almost 400 years. also in0,000 women were the inquisition because they were charged and they did not appalled the religious orthodoxy. islamophobia emerges from that moment and then we get into the first exclusionary act which was directed at muslims from western the first1523, exclusionary measure directed at muslims from west africa as well as slaves who lived with the ottomans. that is where you begin the discussion about where these ideas that every once in a while, they get to percolate, and the continuation of trying

to create what they call. he of race. so we speak about the theology in thethe theology is discussion, and we had a whole debate about whether native americans have a soul or did not soul, and we end up genocide. african-american slaves arrived as cargo, not as human beings, and we have to deal with what that means still today, the debate about black lives matter. when you say black lives matter, everyone jumps in with "everyone's lives matter." but a whole bunch of lives were brought as cargo and they still do not matter today. when you say all lives matter, thatonstruct african-americans continue to suffer and that you have to go to the chinese --

white as we were protesting african-american empowerment. then you go to the jewish population and the exclusion of the jewish population and the birth of jewish organizations to try to challenge anti-semitism. the labor movement, the women's movement, the japanese internment, civil rights movement, and then we speak with , with the normative pattern of otherization. all of a sudden, we're talking about islam and chapter five, 7, 114, and so on, and you completely lose the sense that america's norm is otherization. it is the exception. once you put islamophobia in the normative historical trajectory, it is easy to understand what is taking place other than the

conversation of what chapter five of the koran says. you lose completely the full-length of american history as well as european history. europe has a problem with living with others because so far, they have not demonstrated the capacity to live with the other. i think that is what we need to begin the conversation with. [applause] >> good morning again. comments -- i our was intending to do a shameless book plug. the book i can out with lester called presumed guilty. that book ends up -- last year called presumed guilty. islamophobia is a distraction and the way we talk about muslims and violence and terrorism is a distraction.

white christian violence, white american violence. i do not lose any sleep that we spend too much time talking about muslims and violence in america. what we struggle to talk about and have policies against is white nationalists, right-wing commemorating or remembering a long history of violence that targets racial and religious minority communities. we know how to remember 9/11 and we know what the motto of that forget."r it is not a model i encounter when it comes to the genocide of the indigenous populations. where is the 9/11 memorial museum for that, right? what violence we remember, what violence we forget, it is intersected with anxiety about white identity, white nationalism, and white supremacy. that is my preface. a few things, briefly, just to get it going.

first, i am glad we have this panel on this particular topic, the intersections of anti-semitism, islamophobia, white supremacy/white nationalism. it is important that we talk more about this. we are starting to see more public conversations outside of new zealand and that is good as long as we can sustain it. you see it perpetrated. the manifesto is peppered with comments -- starts with earth right, right -- birth rights, right? fear of the loss of white identity in europe and the west. replacement. muslims and immigrants coming to replace us, right? that ist a big surprise on a with that kind of ideology. he is not unique. whatever that manifesto is, it is not unique. it is the same anxieties have been hearing for a long time,

uttered by other political figures in other ways, including donald trump, but not just him. marine le pen in france, the viktor-- the durban -- urban in hungary. the views themselves, the world views are very similar, so seeing that intersection at work is important. the other attack that i think can help us contextualize this particular topic is that it is the latest in a string of attacks for some time now in which angry white men in so-called wester nations have targeted minority communities often in houses of worship. loss ofear of some identity or the threat to white americanism or white european of them -- europeanism. now, christchurch, what do they share in common? angry white men targeting minorities, deemed some sort of

threat as to what it means to be canadian, european, or even white. there are certainly differences in those attacks as well but there is some commonality we should pay attention to as well in making sense of all of this. when it comes to anti-semitism islamophobia, i don't think this is talked about nearly enough. there are very different histories at work and we need to pay attention to that, but there is an intervention in both europe and the united states. i believe at is a mature them on both sides of the continent -- have gone toic -- the same wellspring of white supremacy historically. what does it mean to the american? jews were defined as not white. there is a lot of scholarship on how jews became white, but that is telling you about how jews were russian allies themselves themselves.d the same way we see that in the 20th century.

national identity was being defined over judaism and jewishness, really. so the role that anti-semitism has played in constructing white as a national identity is much longer than the past couple of decades and we need to pay attention to that. that is what i see in a lot of the anti-muslim rhetoric and even now in the united states. serious debates in britain and germany over whether you can be muslim and german, muslim and french, muslim and american. it is that trope, that stereotype, that if you are a racial and religious minority category, you cannot be one of us. that is one of the intersecting points between anti-semitism and islamophobia that we need to pay a lot more attention to then we have and finally, i will say on

that point, we need to pay careful attention to how many operatives pit jews and muslims against each other for a larger and more insidious purpose and projects. that has been happening very recently in america. [applause] this as often say as i can. islamophobia is not the solution to anti-semitism. anti-semitism is not the solution to islamophobia. you would be hard-pressed to find public figures that could say and articulate that very clearly. these two communities are pitted against each other. this is deliberate, orchestrated, insidious, and we must resist it. [applause] i will be really brief. i will start with the story. 9/11, roughly two weeks into 9/11, i was a first-year law student at the ucla school of law. i was one of very few, i would

say, conspicuous and unapologetic muslims. i had a palestinian flag on my backpack. i did not want to hide my muslim and arab identity in the direct aftermath of the terror attacks on a campus, ucla, where islamophobia and zionism were quite strong and pervasive. i sure that story because it segues into what came to be a really transformative experience in my life. take a classnce to called critical race theory from a woman professor named crenshaw. she coined this term thersectionality, mapping margins, marginalizing pieces that came before the canon of what intersectionality means and how it unfolds. i came to learn about islamophobia, orientalism, anti-semitism from a black female professor who taught me about those t anti-semitism from a black female professor who taught me about those things.

i say that to say many things. that these intersections we are talking about right now have to be tethered and tied to this country's history of anti-black racism and otherization of blackness as being the antithesis of white identity, which is a stand-in for citizenship. one of the first things professor crenshaw taught us in that class was that whiteness was not monolithic. whiteness was not fixed. whiteness was perpetually fluid. whiteness vacillates. whiteness is narrowing. it is becoming far more narrow in definition, discursively. one of the first books i read in that class was a book by kieran brodkin called "when jews were not white folks." this idea that jewish identity in the late 19th and early 20th century excluded jews coming from the european continent as

being bona fide whites, even though many jews who did not express their religious identity in vivid, conspicuous terms could pass as white. the more they freely expressed their religious identity, the less white they became. many months ago, individuals of pittsburgh, ce in them, we're pose the exact same thing. emotions, the same inspiration of the shooting in identical to e in the christoter new zealand.

and why is that? doesn't matter that the victims in pittsburgh were jewish? it doesn't matter if the victims were muslim? it does because we embrace the idea of religious pluralism. and individuals should have the right to freely exercise their faith as they see fit, but for the shooter as did not. because they viewed jews in pittsburgh and they viewed muslims in new zealand as pariahs, as individuals that were definitely not white, in a class of individuals that could not be assimilated into the body politic that is the united states and new zealand based on their religious identity. i'm working on a piece called "faith in whiteness" which looks to see how religion interacts with race. there is the growing side of white supremacy that these religious identity as being focal to racial identity, which excludes jews and muslims from this body not only as being qualified as white, but as a class of people that can be assimilated at all into broader society. those are the parallels.

there are distinct troupes and stereotypes attached to muslim idea the dumbest things like violence, savagery, civilizational menace that stem from orientalism. it mines these troupes from the oreo and to -- orientalist imagination. they are distinct in nature but it is key to understand that religious identity is focal and driving with regard to who qualifies as white and who cannot qualify as citizens. [applause] >> so far, we talked about intersections and talked about religious intolerance and the intersections with race. i also want to introduce another term that those of us in critical ethnic and race studies

often use. it is relational. it is not just intersections in terms of the ways in which one's religious identity, gender, and race all work together to either categorize one as, you know, let's talk about migration -- a good immigrant or a bad immigrant -- it is also how certain groups are related in that spectrum of good and bad to another. and i think we cannot talk about the rise of islamophobia and the rise or persistence in both of these terms, islamophobia and anti-semitism, without also understanding the persistence of xenophobia and racism. we talk about this trope of displacement, a trope of

foreignness, and also one thing that we have not talked about is a trope of foreign conspiracy. now, let's not forget that both catholics and jews in the american colonies, some colonies barred them outright. they had unequal access to citizenship. they were prone to expulsion. and let's not forget that the anti-catholic movement in the 19th-century was predicated on this idea of a foreign people conspiracy, that catholic immigrants were allegedly part of an invasion that was organized by foreign catholic monarchs and the pope in rome to take over the united states. this trope that connects religion as a threat -- so non-protestant religion -- as a threat, with foreignness and

with some sort of foreign invasion or conspiracy is one that cuts across both anti-catholicism, anti-semitism, and islamophobia. and so i wonder, you know, we talked a little bit about troops. but can we bring in that global dimension, both historically and in terms of contemporary, if possible? >> if i could speak about islamophobia in the united states. actually, we could have a specific time where it occurred. it is around the obama campaign. if you remember, obama was being accused of being a muslim, that he was part of the brotherhood movement conspiracy, and again, if you think about the conspiracy that the brotherhood would have conspired to bring him in here -- a kenyan in here, to find a white woman,

impregnate her, and to have a child in hawaii and then come back to work in the inner city in chicago to get elected into the senate, to get -- to convince all americans to vote for him to win the presidency. let's say, if they have that conspiracy, i really want to talk to them. [laughter] hatem: and to see if they can take our homelessness program and see if they could actually have a conspiracy that would address it. but it functions. i think that american society at the time, they wanted to use the n-word on obama, but they felt still the oxygen in the air was prohibitive, so they felt comfortable using the m-word as a substitute for using the

n-word, and that is where you get the birth of the birther movement, the tea party, and they stoke islamophobia and it succeeds in the midterm to the 2010 election. the most expensive single deployment of resources in the islamophobic funding is actually around the election of obama. they deployed a documentary "obsession" which was funded by the clarion fund, and just a few weeks before the election, the 2008 election, it was distributed, 28 million copies of the dvd was distributed in your sunday newspaper at a cost of $17 million. i know you and me do not have $17 million. we can barely afford our coffee. this means that somebody that had a very strategic interest to deploy that amount of resources

targeting obama using m-word in place of the n-word. as a result of the economic collapse, a whole host of economic political interests wanted to disrupt any possibility of us having a larger discussion about the failure of our economic program, the failure of our political leadership, and therefore goes into that islamophobia becomes a distraction. instead of thinking why you lost your home or 12 million americans lost their homes, stores close, the reason you think this is taking place is because there is a muslim under your bed. monsters incorporated becomes a substitute for us to have a serious discussion as to why we have the great recession that took place and how did we get into that point?

the other thing we need to relate to the racist structure, the economic structures, and why somebody like a robert mercer, who actually funded the islamophobic adds, creates or funds the cambridge analytical, funds the breitbart, why would somebody of that stature use their resources? you have to always follow the dollars and the interest attached to it. but we have been able to be susceptible to these -- what i consider to be massive advertisement campaigns -- that we begin to understand and think this is a islamophobia. you bought a vw rather than thinking that vw cheated the testing. you think it is a muslim that is in the engine and you begin to run to think about the amount saved rather than saying why did you knowingly cheat the test in order to sell cars to people and then get a slap on the hand, pay a fine, and then do it again? what have to be very smart and how we understand these dynamics and what is being deployed on a daily basis.

[applause] >> did he want to say something about the global aspect and this idea of not just displacement of white bodies in the united states, but muslim immigration as part of a foreign conspiracy? i saw you nodding a lot. i did not know if that was in relation to something. khaled: i'm glad to answer that question, but the first question, it really sat with me. i had a chance to teach this case called korematsu versus the united states, the internment case. when you talk about tropes to effectively other specific groups, there is an interesting juxtaposition between japanese-americans during that era and then catholic americans during that era, right? the way in which your physical

complexion enables you to effectively take cover from otherization, without the ability to pass as white cannot take cover. if we compare what happened, there was this prevailing conspiracy that the catholic church was looking to take over the united states. it never reached the depth of vileness, and that is part and parcel with the phenotype. in the supreme court case, the way in which japanese-americans looked distinct from white americans allowed to stay to mobilize the most in human sort of vile sort of intervention, which is internment of 120 thousand japanese-americans in residence during that time. which gives us considerable insight as to what is happening now globally but also domestically in the united states.

when we can order people based on typical markers, whether -- physical markers, whether hijab, brown the or black skin, it allows more nefarious forms of policing than it does a class of people that have that cover of at least phenotypic whiteness. if you look at what is happening in europe, in france, for instance, 60 to 70% of the prison inmates in france are muslims. 60% to 70%. france -- it is illegal to have racial statistics, right? but studies have shown that the population of muslims in france are 6% to 8%. the fact that the prison population is significantly bigger than the actual population of muslims on the ground just demonstrates kind of the depth of islamophobia in france.

if you were to ask me to compare it, it is worse in france than it is in the united states. it is interesting to see how muslim identity is authorized in nonwhite societies. you can talk about china, the internment of muslims in china. you have reportedly 1.8 muslims being placed in internment camps. that is a country where we don't white supremacy but haan supremacy. that government is effectively using phenotypes, ethnicity, and religion as a way to incarcerate the community. so troops -- two things emanate from that. it is critical to understand that islamophobia looks different and is deployed differently interesting post contexts. the way islamophobia functions in a place like india is dramatically different than it looks here in the united states, where it is tethered with white supremacy.

the second point is that tropes are different. sometimes tropes, are imagined, sometimes they are tied to physical description and race. religiously are different, culturally different tide to physical expression and race, the algorithm that is most destructive is when they are racially different, culturally different. >> as well as gender. khaled: gender as well. >> i want to push on the concept of race a little bit more. because i think it is so important historically to understand how categories of race have changed over time. right? so one of the things about the anti-catholic movement is that irish catholics were actually thought of as racially and biologically different and inferior to anglo-saxon protestants. however is that they were never

denied the power to vote, which gets us back to democracy and how we can fight against the powers of hate and violence. so i would argue one of the most important reasons why irish eventually became white, even though they were never not white, is because they had the power to vote politicians out of office -- zenophobic politicians out of office. the know nothing party, their slogan was america for americans. they got voters to the polls to vote for an anti-immigrant politicians and anti-immigrant policies. they had one million members in the 1850's. hugely important.

we could not have trump without the know nothings. you cannot have the chinese exclusion act or the japanese-american incarceration without the group that allowed sena phobia to become -- xenophobia as an american tradition. irish not white. jews, southern italians, and eastern europeans as somehow less than white. asians for sure were not white as well as with african-americans and native americans. how do we continue to morph as racial categories? how do those change? how is it that chinese emigrants, who were the first to be banned as a group, are now the model minority? and what does that mean? and how do we use another trope, the good immigrant versus the bad immigrant, as a source of distraction? as a source of division?

so i want to now maybe turn the conversation a little bit more toward what do we do about it? it has been revealed now that you cannot study these systems of hate in a vacuum. i remember an article, headline, after pittsburgh. it was a quote from i think one of the members of the synagogue, and it basically said we thought anti-semitism was dead. now, we know better. one of the things i have seen in the past few years is i think the resurgence of interfaith coalitions, interracial coalitions. there have been many times over the past several centuries and

certainly several decades since the civil rights movement, when social justice struggles have brought people together, people who had not worked together before, so this is not necessarily something new, but it does seem much more magnified and hopefully lays the foundation for a broader and enduring coalition than what we have seen before. so i wanted to turn the conversation to what you all have seen on the ground and whether you see the same developments as somehow cautiously optimistic or what we should be keeping in mind as we think about turning our intention to challenging these systems of oppression. >> i can speak to that a little bit. i will start off.

so community organizing, basically says that the way to solve these things is about relationships. it is about how we make connections across seeming differences and how we use those to create change that impacts the communities. we see each other as interconnected. it is not just about having this vague understanding but really understanding how these things operate on a systemic level and how they are ongoing like you said since the inquisition, and understanding our history is an understanding how there is a very intentional effort to divide us. i want to be the most left person. i want to be the most progressive, the most radical person. one of the most radical things you can do is come together and learn about other people and not

just in superficial ways but in real ways where you have real relationships with people and you are working on common things together. i would throw in that having a sense of hope, which can feel really impossible and fluffy and how do we even grab onto that given the magnitude of all the things going on? just knowing we have this history and we have these demonstratable moments in history where people have made things better. using that is a big, important thing, so on the ground, i would say people are seeing bigger stakes. in minneapolis, around the organizing we are doing around immigration and the criminal

justice system and those intersections, i feel like there's a lot of stuff that people have been working on for decades now it is finally coming together because people see how much higher the stakes are. they are seeing, you know, we studied about this intersectionality. we have learned about it. we have heard about it. we had conversations about it, but people are seeing how it is playing out in our individual and communal lives, putting a lot of fire under people to change things for the better. >> so much of our audience is local. can you give us a specific example project group that we might want to know more about? >> there is a campaign that jewish community action is involved in with over 30 plus community organizations from labor, from different faith groups, from immigrant groups, from criminal justice groups who have come together to work on issues around ice and how ice is in cooperation with the county. we are working on a campaign to separate out so the sheriff no longer cooperates with ice and no longer says have an office in our jails so as soon as people come in for a traffic violation,

you can take them off for whatever you do with people. we have people who are making a lot of progress around that. there are some politicians listening around for that. the group has been working for a long time on getting drivers licenses for all, so this is a way for undocumented communities to have access to identification that makes life a lot more fluid for people who do not have to worry about that. you may take for granted all these different examples of when you need an id when you do not have a license. it is not easy. that is a couple of examples. >> thank you. >> if i could complicate the issue a little bit. i think we have to be very careful of not jumping from where the crisis is to having interfaith or interfaith dialogue, assuming that the heavy lifting of dealing with the crisis itself is not being done.

so i have a person that actually works on interfaith work for justice. if you want to have a dialogue about your idea of god and my idea of god, take a theology class. seriously. for me to take me out of my day, for us to read two or three texts of religious significance, for me, that is a class and urology or interreligious dialogue. but if you are actually trying to change the society for social justice, there has to be interfaith work for justice, and we need to deal with the contradictions that exist in our own communities. i know for myself, as an arab palestinian, muslim, there are contradictions in my community around racial issues. on one hand, they want to deal with racism. there is anti-black racism in the community. there are some economic pernicious activities that take

place in the immigrant community. i worked in oakland. in every corner, there is a liquor store. unfortunately, some of them are owned by immigrants. for me, that is a contradiction. you cannot fight islamophobia without actually dealing with a contradiction that exist in there. there has to be some heavy lifting to deal with it. i cannot speak about muslim prisoners without recognizing that we have a prison industrial complex, where if you are black, your track to jail is much faster than to yale across this country. we cannot all of a sudden begin being super human rights activists but not dealing with our contradictions. we cannot deal with islamophobia and anti-semitism without confronting the question of palestine and israel. we cannot deal with we cannot all of a sudden, because we are dealing with islamophobia, be

super human rights activist but not deal with our contradictions. to complicate this a little further, we cannot deal with islamophobia and independent -- anti-semitism without dealing with israel and palestine. we cannot deal with islamophobia without dealing with why is there a segment of the pro-israel jewish community and major jewish organizations, putting their bed on aligning with the white in the united states and thinking that stoking white supremacy and islamophobia is a way to protect israel? the relationship of white supremacy to jewish and muslims are equal opportunity.

they hate both. today there are opportunistic considerations, or they think that possibly islamophobia could bring jesus quicker. that contradiction has to be understood and we need to challenge our own communities as we confront islamophobia and anti-semitism. behind every islamophobia is an anti-semite. he supports israel for the wrong considerations. those contradictions have to be resolved and addressed. otherwise, we are singing we are the world while the world is not in cleaning us in conceptualizing the world. those contradictions have to be addressed in a systematic way. [applause] >> it is a great question. how do we respond to all of this? spending a day talking about islamophobia is overwhelming and then we get cynical and go home depressed. i spent a year at the state department trying to advise on islamophobia and i have engaged other audiences, department of homeland security, fbi. it is frustrating work. the change will not come from

above although the policies you need to change. but the change will come from below, from grassroots movements. i think the most significant changes in american history, social changes, have come from below, from a bus boycott in alabama, that hit the people where it hurts and the people who benefited from jim crow. as it spread it got more organized. since the 1960's, there has been a successful counter civil rights movement that existed that led to what is called the new jim crow. is not a linear process to be sure. i think the most significant change comes from below. i agree that relationship building is key. we have studies on this, if you know someone of a different religion from your own, you are much less likely to be prejudiced against that community. if i know someone who is jewish, i am less likely to be anti-semitic.

there are caveats to those studies and a lot of it has to do with me being less anti-semitic, if it translates into significant political action. how do you affect political change when individuals are changing their opinions the policies are not changing? had we challenge that into political movements? as a someone who has traveled around the united states and abroad on this topic, the most successful instances i have seen of pushing back against islamophobia effectively in the political sense have come from coalitions that include partners that have been around not for a few years but easily for decades. they have really established deep roots in the community and have been doing this work long-term. few audiences want me to talk about -- the real solutions are long-term. we are trying to do triage. but if we don't have a long-term strategy, we are in trouble. that involves relationship building, coalition building, and translating that into

effective political action. for those fearing there would be large number of catholics, why they were afraid those fearing there would be large number of catholics, why they were afraid, they were actually large number of catholics. catholics could build effective political movements. build social institutions, educational institutions, hospitals that ingrained them into a lot of different ommunities, including the twin cities. you have a lot of catholic institutions in this region. muslims make up just about 1% or 2% of the population depending on the poll you look at. they are a much smaller community. they don't have those same kinds of institutions over time that catholics have been able to build. that might change, but the numbers are certainly not there.

coalition building is more significant, which is why i harp on allies and my frustration with many of our allies not doing coalition building. i think it is all our responsibilities to battle islamophobia and all forms of racism, but i feel the primary moral responsibility falls to people like me. muslims fighting islamophobia are trying to survive. jews fighting anti-semitism are trying to survive. it falls on people with my background to do more of the heavy lifting, i don't think were doing our part of the lifting and are taking seriously that the primary moral burden is primarily emanating from us. that is what needs to change. in instances where i have seen that happen in local communities here and there, i have seen it great work translating that into a national movement, and i think it will be significant if we are going to change these policies, and elections do matter.

that doesn't mean voting for the democratic party cures islamophobia, there are 20 of islam of folks in the democratic party, elections do matter. this region of all regions knows that because of the history you have made here. history can be repeated in other places and we might start to see significant change in this country. >> i would like to add a few more comments. that is that it is also dependent on communities like mine, communities who have experienced past injustices and know what it is like to be excluded and banned and separated from families, to be able to see ourselves in communities suffering the same as well. i want to call your attention to the back of your program, you will see the list of sponsors. one of the leading civil rights organizations nationally is the japanese-americans citizens league. there is the one with the crest of an eagle, especially the ways

in which they have partnered with care minnesota to call out islamophobia and all forms of injustice and bigotry in a massive campaign. i have to say, i just finished writing a history of xenophobia of the united states from the colonial era to the present and i do not end on a hopeful note, i have to say. by the end of writing the book, i wanted to crawl into a dark space and cry. so i do see some hopeful change, but this goes far beyond 2020, a goes far beyond the united states. we will have a fantastic session later this afternoon on global islamophobia. this is not a problem that is going away, with record numbers of people being forced from their homes. 16 million recorded by the u.s. last year, and more countries moving to the far right, nationalist and isolationist

policies. this is the tip of the iceberg. i hate to say it. the kinds of work that you all are doing, in your various institutions and with the projects that help educate the rest of us as well as the work on the ground is the first step. thank you so much. i promised more time for questions. we have a little less than 20 minutes. i am sure there are people who want to share experiences and offer insights. i'm going to open the floor. i don't know how this works. do i run around with a microphone? ok. raise your hand please if you have a question you would like to ask the panel. question you e to ask the panel. >> i just had a quick question. i'm wanting to find out, what

are some ways -- i am a muslim myself, and i want to know what t are some ways that we perpetuate islamophobia ideas either consciously or subconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally. what are some examples, and how do we identify that? say the following, there are bad muslims, good muslims, in between muslims, and then there is me. [laughter] >> claim of the opinion that no matter what a muslim does, it should not be a rationalization for blaming the group. that is the basis of racism. for muslims, to think we have to go through therapy to make racistss perfect so the

will not hit us in the face. we need to get rid of this aspect that muslim actions result in the islamophobia and racism toward muslims. the mere fact is the following, white supremacy, which in the past few years has been the primary perpetrator of violence, we don't actually have discrimination structurally, which would be legitimate if that paradigm is help, would be the response to it. we are living in a global white supremacy that is systemic, and committedviolence is from white supremacists, we don't attribute or attached to it the same type of consequences. ist of what i also recommend and cdregating violence from islamophobia. this is a discussion we had at

the carter center, the whole discussion began that in order to address islamophobia, we have and addressve counter violent extremism. of these two, again, just using the concept of black on black violence, you don't address racism against blacks by -- you need to address black on black violence, because we don't approach the problems from that vantage point. we need a methodology that is sound and universal and can stand the test of time. lastly i would say the following, and this is from a piece i wrote, humanizing the human is a dehumanizing acts. i am already human. engaging in a discourse to humanize the human begins with dehumanizing because you're asking them to come into a point

where they have to assert they are human, and that this course is very -- that discourse is very problematic. mean you don't have to relate to people as people, and with the contradiction, you do. but the methodology of saying we are going to engage in that were toward, for me it leads to a much more complex problem in the long run. any other questions? >> hello. from southern africa. most african families are huge. on my father's side alone, i have over 100 cousins. i would rather fight with all of them. is, youon i say this said something about marrying two ideas together.

these two ideas are pretty horrible, but if you married them together, what is the worst that could happen to muslim leaders or the muslim community? i am not muslim. terrorist, that phrase seems to [indiscernible] for a lot of people. now, white supremacist seems to be rolling off a lot of tongues. i am pretty average, but i hear what you're saying. what is the worst that could said, is muslim leaders if they condemned muslim terrorists and in the same sentence married muslim terrorists with white supremacy terrace -- terrorists? talking about in speeches that are given. a lot of people talk about muslim terrorists, what would happen if you combined muslim

terrorists like white supremacist terrorists do xyz? what would happen if they married those ideas together? hard, it wouldis whoard for white americans -- forgive my words. i feel it would be hard for not --mericans who are what is wrong with marrying the two ideas? muslim terrorist, white supremacist terrorists, condemned both and have muslim leaders say it. i'm not sure, especially with people who don't like muslims, i would fight against that.

muslim terrorism is messed up and white supremacist terrorism is messed up. understand ando maybe respond to this. if you think about terrorism as a concept, it has no religious identity nor racial identity, it crosses the border. meaning every group has an individual -- has individuals that commit terrorist attacks. it seems that we exceptional as the muslim category. when a muslim commits a terrorist act, the attribute that is most focused on is the muslimness, not the terrorist part. when a white person commits an act, the act becomes the focus, and then we try to find what is the stimuli? they have psychological problems

and so on. we don't ask the priest of his church to discuss, condemned, and engage. for the muslim subject, we go seven generations back, where he attended or passed a mosque, even though they likely would not have been in a mosque or recognized a mosque. the more religious you are, the more cynically engaged -- more cynically -- civically engaged. i did a study on this. the more you volunteer and the more you donate. but you don't see this framing because the only framing that wants to be operable is the muslim terrorist because there is a whole structure that responds to this. we need to speak today of the counter violent extremism industrial complex. we need to speak of the war on

terror as a financial enterprise and economic enterprise that the iraqleast since war, close to $6 trillion have been used in the war on terror, where the united states has to plummet and 39 different countries post 9/11. muslimu get the attribute in there, it begins to shut out the analytical way of how we need to understand. what we don't need to marry is the following, countering violent extremism being what it to addressing islamophobia. they are different. we need to understand what are the stimuli, what brings someone to commit a terrorist act come a whether they are muslim or otherwise? what are the psychological phases? what are the ingredients?

what are the rationalizations that took place from the dominant society where muslims are that begin to override them and them from society? structurally, theoretically, these are two different phenomena. the individuals that insist on marrying them are basically trying to give legitimacy to the securitization of muslim subjects could -- subjects. we are not going to address islamophobia unless we address counter violent extremism. outcome in logical this sense that we need to argue and insist on separating methodologies to addressing each and not making one contingent on the other. it doesn't mean they don't have are you call elements that

mobilized, that is mobilizing certain elements versus the structural elements to -- the structural elements. >> when it's a terrorists in new zealand commit that act, they are not going to australia and asking wightman to apologize -- asking white men to apologize for that act. they're not asking wightman how they feel about terrorism. but black and brown and asian, there is a collateral guilt the entire group is responsible for the acts of one bad actor. that is very much a cornerstone of white supremacy, that privilege and presumption of individuality is always attached to bad actors on the white side. we can see reframing in the media, the way in which we call terrorists lone wolf, they are sick, they are always aberrant.

on the muslim side, there something more with the collective and the entire body that these individuals are emanations of an entire monolithic block, where is -- where is white individuals are individualized. [applause] say, why just quickly we should not ask muslims to condemn terrorism is a racist question. we should all condemn terrorism, that what gets labeled as terrorism? it has become a racialized term. it doesn't generally refer to people like me. new zealand has been trying to use the word for the sky but it does not role naturally off of the tongue of journalists to look at a guy like that and call him a terrorist good -- a terrorist.

it is a racialized term it does not apply to everyone. moreover, in that context, when muslims get singled out, where is that moderate muslim? this question has been asked journalistsy major and prominent political operatives across the political spectrum, democrats and republicans. it is a racist question. i tell you this because i can tell you who confirmed this for me, mike pompeo, secretary of state, in his senate confirmation, when he was called out for after the boston marathon bombings complaining that muslim leaders are not doing enough to speak out against terrorism, which is a lie. was called one that to address that in the senate confirmation hearing, he tried to qualify it a little bit of the following question was,

what would it take for muslims to do enough to condemn terrorism in a way that is satisfying to people like me? and he was honest and said, i am not sure there is enough. i don't think muslims can condemn terrorism until they're are blue in the face, it doesn't matter. you are still subject to collective guilt. can giveno answer you or dance you can do that will persuade many prominent politicians and journalists asking that question, that muslims are somehow complicit in or harboring late violent terrorist some of these. you will continue to be objects of suspicion. we need to start calling out, and people like me particularly, need to call up the racism behind the questions, including when respectable journalists ask such ridiculous questions. the answer to whether muslims are condemning terrorism is a five second google search away.

you don't have to be an expert in a google search engine's to find the answer to that. the very question itself, even with the answer, is prejudiced and not something that has been asked of me, people assume i condemn christchurch. people assume i condemn what happened and trust him. charleston.in muslims are not given the same consideration and that is racism. [applause] thank you, i will make this quick. thank you for coming today, i have enjoyed listening to each of your perspectives. ofm the executive sergeant the major crimes division for the st. paul police department. collectinguties is bias and hate crime statistics and also being the final arbiter for st. paul before we submit numbers to the fbi.

we have 15 hate crimes last year in 2018. many, but a- too 25% decrease from the year before. i don't know what that means. does that mean hate crimes are down anecdotally? around the country, no. obviously i don't know if that is a matter of it not being reported, if people are worried about working with the police department. what i would like to reaffirm is our commitment to all the communities and st. paul, and i wonder if you could enlighten us on what you can do in your role as leaders to assist the police department to call out these things, to investigate these types of incidents. [applause] [indiscernible]

hate crimes are so very problematic, because not every hate crime is [indiscernible] i am used to that. [laughter] the statistics on hate crimes is not there. what gets reported is a small number we know this not only in relation to hate crime, again, i work on campus on the whole issue of rape, sexual harassment, and we know that only a small number of cases get thoseed and smaller than get escalated to a natural investigation. so there is a challenge of educating our community. just this past year, i developed an app, islamophobia reporting

app command return to get it to the community. it has different types of incidents that could be reported. gets to bencident actionable because some incidents are not. for example, somebody saying go back home is not actionable but it is a form of harassment, your body and space does not feel safe. so we need to document those. we send those that require follow-up to the police as well as cair and other civil rights organizations. in order for us to have a data set that could give a picture of what has taken place. we are hoping on a monthly basis to send out to policymakers as well as the community those cases that are occurring that are being recorded and distribute this in the

community. the second level development of the app, we are trying to aggregate a twitter feed into it in order to see where the twitter feed, in relation to his homophobic rhetoric on social media, especially twitter, do we have a zone where maybe there is a hate group operating or a civil society actor or islamophobiaing and increasing the level of hate crimes and hate incidents and the community? that is the next level because i think data is very important. if you don't have data, you cannot impact the people on the front line or the policy. this is for the community and others. conference andr you can collect data on racial disparity. if there is no data, there is no problem. structure, aof the

pernicious structure relative in france to islamophobia, you don't have the data that can look at the problem with a complete set to understand what is taking place. set and it mayta be incomplete and we need to complete it. >> i have the card that says time and i think you all might be hungry for lunch. if you can help me in thanking our analysts -- our panelists for a great conversation. [applause] >> all this month on c-span,