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This bit of fascism from Tom Cotton is the latest in a long weekend that clarifies (with horrible detail) the deep connections between US imperial projects, Islamophobia, and the brutality of domestic police. (A thread just to organize my thoughts...) https://twitter.com/tparsi/status/1267464672514637828?s=20
Just materially and technologically, we can see the weapons of the US "War on Terror" being used in American cities, as @ProfPaulPoast's recent thread discussed: https://twitter.com/ProfPaulPoast/status/1267048272314712064?s=20
Most dramatically, CBP was flying a fucking Predator drone over Minneapolis. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dzbe3/customs-and-border-protection-predator-drone-minneapolis-george-floyd
And companies such as Palantir—who got off the ground with funding from the CIA ( https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106479613) and work extensively with the US military—have contracts to organize LAPD surveillance. https://theintercept.com/2018/05/11/predictive-policing-surveillance-los-angeles/
Darren Byler ( @dtbyler) has written on how the Chinese govt has turned the bodies of Uyghur Muslims into a "tech incubator" for surveillance/military start-ups. Xinjiang is a place to practice your facial recognition software on a racialized populace. https://logicmag.io/china/ghost-world/
That tech—developed through experimentation upon the lives and data and bodies of Uyghur Muslims—is then sold to France, the US, Israel, etc.
Aside from the actual "stuff" of war brought to US police departments, there are the connections between the personnel: IDF training of US PDs, military to PD cycles, and—close to home for me—the hiring of a Guantanamo chief to run UNCC's campus security https://www.ninertimes.com/featured/campus-flyer-implicates-associate-vice-chancellor-of-human-rights-violations-during-his-military-service-at/article_ef756e25-a5e1-537b-be92-b1053fc0aa51.html
As Sylvester Johnson ( @syljohns) and Arun Kundnani ( @ArunKundnani) & others have argued, there's a line to be drawn from FBI tactics against the Nation of Islam through to the Black Panthers, to American Muslims after 9/11, to Occupy Wall Street, to BLM...
If we're thinking budgets, Wadie Said has made a convincing case: the surge of funding for the FBI after 9/11 encourages the FBI to find domestic enemies and use their funding...no matter what. "The Newburgh Sting" and "(T)error" illustrate some consequences.
Wadie Said's book ("Crimes of Terror") also makes clear how much the domestic legal situation changed with the Patriot Act (and the Freedom Act, recently renewed with bipartisan consensus!). Fear of "scary Muslims" abroad transformed the tools of policing at home.
All of this is to say: there is a co-constitutive relationship between what the military does abroad and what the police do at home. Anti-Blackness and Islamophobia are distinct, but the tools/ideologies of policing Black and Muslim live are developed together, across the globe.
As both Malcolm X and MLK argued, the dismantling of American white supremacy needed to be coupled with the dismantling of the US empire abroad.
What seems totally perverse in all of this is how the US-built "liberal world order"—so bathed in blood—was often sold to the world on the basis of US multiculturalism! (For the blood: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/opinion/sunday/united-states-cold-war.html) For the propaganda, see next tweet...)
From jazz bands to documentaries at US embassies, the US commodified an illusion of racial/ethnic/religious equality as part of propaganda efforts since the Cold War. Check out the concluding chapters of @DrSuad's incredible "Muslim Cool" as well as @HishamAidi's "Rebel Music."
While I'm on the incredible work of @DrSuad, check out this piece from the Boston Review on the double violence experienced by Black Muslims (the whole forum is excellent): http://bostonreview.net/forum/islam-trial/suad-abdul-khabeer-suad-abdul-khabeer-responds-amna-akbar-and-jeanne-theoharis
So technologically, materially, financially, personnel-wise ideologically, tactically...the systems for punishing the "unruly" at home are developed abroad. The threat of the "terrorist" justifies new budgets and new tools that then prop up racial/class hierarchies domestically.
Just a couple of other resources here:
-On counterinsurgency and domestic policing: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520295629/badges-without-borders
-On Malcolm X's internationalism and Black Freedom across the globe: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/black-star-crescent-moon
-On counterinsurgency and domestic policing: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520295629/badges-without-borders
-On Malcolm X's internationalism and Black Freedom across the globe: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/black-star-crescent-moon
