Prologue: To Be Scorned

daily televised murder will do strange things to the mind. even stranger things to the heart.

In late September of 2023, I sat on a stage at the Four Seasons hotel in Doha, to present at a panel alongside journalists I greatly admire: Spencer Ackerman and Laila Al Arian.

Ackerman, who won a Pulitizer for his work on the 2013 surveillance story, was a columnist at The Nation, while Al Arian was a colleague of mine at Al Jazeera, where she is the Executive Producer of Emmy and Peabody-winning series Faultlines. Both have done and continue to do incomparable journalism on the War on Terror, the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the nature of American warfare - within the borders of the United States and outside of it. And then there was me: at the time, I was an on-camera Correspondent for AJ+, a channel under Al Jazeera, where I was doing a series called ‘Backspace’ - a media critique show dedicated to looking how major stories are told in U.S. and offering context in history, power and narrative construction in order to re-engage with the relationship news consumers have with the news industry. Much like Ackerman and Al Arian, I have spent much of my career discussing the contours, shadows and ashes of the War on Terror, U.S foreign policy and the American Muslim community - with a hyper-focus on Palestine and the Israeli occupation and apartheid.

Little did I know that the conversation we were about to have on our panel was going to come to be the most critical one we’d be facing on our return to the United States.

About a month prior, Georgetown-Qatar had reached out to me, asking if I’d be willing to speak at what would be an unprecedented conference on Islamophobia, bringing together thinkers, scholars, journalists, activists from all over the world. The topic of our panel would be on the role of the media, specifically in the United States, in fomenting Islamophobia. While all panelists offered searing criticisms of the news industry - with a lot of historical context in the mix - I wanted to focus on expanding our understanding of ‘Islamophobia’: a term, I told an audience of a few hundred early that morning, I am not a fan of because it fails to fully encompass the breadth and nature of systemized violence and dehumanization that underscores what we call ‘Islamophobia’.

“And Muslims…have emerged from this…completely transformed in how they view themselves, their power, sovereignty and their faith.”

I want to write about this more in depth, but consider Islamophobia - like many other systems of bigotries - as playing a function. Anti-Black racism has historically played - and continues to play - a specific function where by resources from one group are moved to another group. These ‘resources’ include everything from labour to physical bodies and this transfer was systemized and institutionalized, creating whole new identities reliant on the power they took or had taken from them. Islamophobia plays a function and this function becomes apparent when we look at how it’s specifically been formulated since 1979 - post-Islamic Revolution in Iran, which was seminal as a ‘third world’ anti-imperial resistance that had successfully taken power back from the growing American empire (In Covering Islam, Edward Said emphasizes this year as particularly critical - which is what led him to write this book on Islam & U.S. media). My simple argument - built upon the work of individuals such as Said, Massad, Sayyid, Hallaq, Abu Lughod - is that Islamophobia plays the specific function of engendering the righteousness of not only American imperialism but the entirety of the Western Liberal project which necessitates that specific bodies, beliefs, lives, lands and (pathways to) God be sacrificed at its altar for its continued prosperity in monopolizing the means of life and power.

And so what this does, in effect, is systemize mass state-sanctioned violence against Muslim populations, whose very existence is seen as a threat to that prosperity I mentioned in the previous sentence. Even ‘positive’ representation - ‘good representation’ - in media, whether news or popular, is still put up against this backdrop. And Muslims, as individuals and as populations, have emerged from this systemization of violence that relies on categorizing them as inherently in opposition to the Western Liberal project, as completely transformed in how they view themselves, their power, sovereignty and their faith.

Like I said, I’ll write about this more in depth.

Following the panel, a few hours before our flights home, Ackerman and I were walking with other colleagues along the corniche in Doha, on the lookout for some chapatis with karak chai - the perfect way to spend your 1 am, along a breezy coastline of an Island. Ackerman, working on a column for The Nation on Saudi/Israel normalization efforts, asked me - as one casually does - what I thought about the potential deal.

This was on October 2nd.

“Less than a week later, Palestinian groups showed the world exactly who would advocate for them - normalization or not.”

Like many, I felt a sense of despair on the prospect of the deal. I told Ackerman that the deal would feel like a final nail in the coffin for Palestinian liberation, because once KSA officially would normalize several other Arab and Muslim states would undoubtedly follow. ‘Who,’ I said to him, ‘will advocate for the Palestinians then? No one does now, of course, on the international stage - but the facade of advocacy surely is better than whatever mass normalization would bring? The Haifa port?’

Less than a week later, Palestinian groups showed the world exactly who would advocate for them - normalization or not.

I was in Istanbul on October 7th - on October 8th, I was under my covers back in Washington D.C, my eyes glued - more than usual - to my phone. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Al Jazeera Arabic/English as I, alongside hundreds of millions of people around the world, watched in horror what was unfolding before us in Gaza.

Saturn Devouring His Son, Francisco Goya (1820-23)

I never had any illusions about U.S. news media’s position on Palestine - in fact, I would say if there’s anything that is my hyper-expertise/obsession its exactly this subject. But I still was unprepared for what was coming in the coming days, weeks and months: an entire media regime dedicated to the explicit annihilation of an entire people.

I used to believe that this industry, that I had climbed into with difficulty, was capable of reform. I used to believe that the bigotries and biases I saw, growing up, that showed my peoples as caricatures of evil were bigotries and biases that could be dismantled piece by piece - that sensibility could prevail with some elbow grease and patience.

But I was wrong.

After one year of non-stop televised murder on our screens, non-stop shredding of human bodies - including tens of thousands of children - that has been justified, ignored and hidden, I do not believe that any semblance of reform in the U.S. news media is possible. To believe it is, is to completely ignore and erase the role our news media - as a structure, as an institution - plays in the power superstructure of American Empire. And to believe this is to deny the function that Islamophobia plays in this Empire in its blood-soaked growth.

Many of the things I believed on October 6th, I ceased to believe on October 7th. Everything I viewed as it was, is no longer.

And so this is Views My Own.