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I didn’t respond to @paulkrugman's original tweet because I assumed it was just a bad tweet and that he’d figure that out on his own. But now I'm realizing that a lot of the events that defined the past 19 years for people like me didn’t even register with him. THREAD https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1305234617952337929
The problem with the argument he makes here is that it doesn’t recognize that most of the "anti-Muslim sentiment and violence" was *officially sanctioned*. Focusing narrowly on hate crimes stats has the effect of moving all of that out of the picture.
For example, hundreds of Muslim men were rounded up in New York and New Jersey in the weeks after 9/11. They were imprisoned without charge and often subject to abuse in custody because of their religion. None of this would register in any hate crimes database.
The NYPD spent years infiltrating American Muslim organizations, surveilling mosques, extorting vulnerable people to turn against their communities—a strategy that was based on prejudice and turned up no terrorists. @adamgoldmanNYT & @mattapuzzo wrote a book about it.
Border agents harassed, intimidated, and interrogated American Muslims returning from abroad, and foreign Muslims visiting the US, often asking them to justify their religious beliefs and practices. That’s not in the hate crimes databases either.
Thanks to @attackerman, we have a lot of info about how the FBI was training its agents ten years after 9/11: https://www.wired.com/2011/09/fbi-muslims-radical/
Anyone who thinks the torture of prisoners in US military custody (at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere) had nothing to do with religion doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Here’s an email an FBI agent wrote about what he saw at Guantanamo. https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/torturefoia/released/FBI_4747.pdf
Interrogators routinely exploited Muslim prisoners’ religious beliefs in order to pressure them to share information. Here’s one example: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/28/us/exgi-writes-about-use-of-sex-in-guantanamo-interrogations.html
If you’re under the impression that the war in Iraq had nothing to do with prejudice, you’ve forgotten about stuff like this:
I could go on. The US has been in a paroxysm of "anti-Muslim sentiment and violence" for going on twenty years. That this doesn't seem to have registered with Krugman is really amazing to me, and pretty disturbing.
