Alternet

During the second presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Gorbah Hamed asked the candidates how they would help Muslims deal with “the consequences of being labeled…a threat to the country.” Trump decried Islamophobia as a “shame” but quickly moved on to accuse American Muslims of not reporting “radical Islamic terrorism” and President Obama and Hillary Clinton for not using the term. Clinton assured the questioner that Muslims are very much a part of the United States and that she wished for a country “where citizens like you and your family are just as welcome as anyone else.” Nonetheless, she insisted, American Muslims must be “our eyes and ears on our front lines.”

Clinton’s response, despite including platitudes about Muslims being a part of the country, exhibited a tendency among many national security-minded Democrats to ultimately stigmatize Muslims as a suspect community that must be constantly monitored. Where Trump was accusatory, suggesting against all evidence that American Muslims do not report suspicious behavior, Clinton was more polished and appeared warm and friendly, asking the community to become “part of our homeland security.”

Donald Trump’s penchant for Islamophobia has long been obvious, but Hillary Clinton’s comments were no accident either. Throughout her campaign, Clinton spoke of deputizing American Muslims as agents of the state, always on alert for the first signs of their family and friends’ terrorist proclivities. By peddling such narratives of American Muslims as a suspect community, the Clinton campaign was undoubtedly contributing to Islamophobia but it was also following the established practices of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.

During the past eight years, Democrats have echoed much of the Islamophobia now emanating from an incoming Trump administration through both rhetoric and policies. At times it is brazen, but mostly it is couched in an unmistakably liberal gloss of civility and delivered with a smile. As President-elect Trump appoints Islamophobes to his cabinet and prepares to directly target American Muslims, much of the precedents he will rely on have already been firmly established by the Obama administration and supported by the Democratic Party.

Muslim Registry

Perhaps the most recent example of Democratic support for Islamophobic policies emerged after the horrific shooting in a gay nightclub in Orlando. House Democrats staged a sit-in to force a vote on gun control measures which would mandate the use of terrorist watch lists to prevent people from purchasing firearms. There are different estimates for just how many names exist on various terrorist watch lists. There are approximately 81,000 names on the No-Fly List (including a 7-month-old baby), 1.5 million names on the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) list, and 800,000 names in the FBI’s database.

The vast majority of these names belong to Muslims who are never informed of their inclusion in these secret lists and find it a nearly impossible feat to have their names removed. Inclusion in the list, however, does not seem to require much of anything. According to a document obtained by The Intercept, these lists require “neither ‘concrete facts’ nor ‘irrefutable evidence’ to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist.” The American Civil Liberties Union has long condemned these lists as “a massive, virtually standardless government watchlisting scheme that ensnares innocent people and encourages racial and religious profiling.” None of this stopped liberal darling Elizabeth Warren from calling everyone on the lists “ISIS.”

Surveillance

Donald Trump’s explicit calls for a registry of Muslims may have been challenged by Democrats, but the lists maintained by the Obama administration have escaped any such scrutiny. American Muslim communities have also been subjected to FBI’s geo-mapping efforts, which included the development of maps “displaying the patterns of life in minority neighborhoods” and indicating “where people live, work, pray, eat and shop.” The Domain Management program was the “foundation for the FBI's counterterrorism dragnet” and allowed agents to “target specific communities to recruit informants.”

In addition to being FBI targets, American Muslims also have to deal with the “deep embedding of federal counter-terrorism and intelligence-gathering efforts” in their communities. Trump may have issued blunt calls for law enforcement patrolling of “Muslim neighborhoods” but local law enforcement agencies have already been using more “sophisticated if sometimes intrusive outreach and informant programs.” Community outreach efforts have often turned out to be nothing more than intelligence gathering operations. One program funded by the Department of Justice in 2009, for example, was aimed at promoting St. Paul Police Department’s “involvement with the Somali/Muslim community” in order to “prevent further radicalization of our youth.” Instead, the program was used by the police department to gather intelligence on the local Somali community.

The surveillance of American Muslim communities by local law enforcement agencies has been directly funded by the Obama administration. Hence, it is no surprise that the administration’s promise of a review of the “religious profiling and suspicionless surveillance of Muslims” by the NYPD’s Demographics Unit has remained unfulfilled. Undeterred by any federal oversight, the NYPD has seen little reason to alter its policies. A recent report by the NYPD Inspector General noted that the Department’s Intelligence Bureau “consistently broke court-imposed rules governing investigations involving political activity.” Over 95% of these investigations targeted Muslims. [MORE]