Check-in/Why I came tonight:

Seeing that there is a lot I don’t see, want to build more consciousness in this area
Trump’s intolerable promotion of Islamophobia
Own identity as Jew and history of Holocaust contributing to need to not let it happen again

It’s been hard to watch the Right wing backlash against Syrian refugees as well as motivated by involvement in Palestinian support movements Figuring out how to talk to my Jewish relatives to counteract their racism and xenophobia – don’t want to live in a world founded on fear and hate narratives

Experienced a lot of conflict while living in Tel Aviv about Syrian conflict and other issues – terrifying
Experiences in travel to London after attacks
Spent a lot of time in Israel and in Palestine, alarmed by rising tide of American vitriol, partner and his family are xenophobic, also have seen the experience of being exposed to very violent rhetoric around Jihad

Background in anti-war studies and being steeped in the rhetoric almost broke me, what is this experience of living in a military empire
Trump’s rhetoric has inspired action, support and dialogue about civil liberties and rights issues, which is incredible, and this has been a concern for a long time

A little background:
Structural, tangible “blind spot”

o ie – WPC several years ago – out of 100s of topics, there was just one workshop about xenophobia

Anti-Muslim rhetoric has been one of the strongest forms of xenophobia One trainer presented about this wall about challenging anti-Muslim racism due in many ways to unacknowledged bias

o I’m not religious, so it’s not my thing to think about (hard to focus on overlap of religion and race)

o Misperception of relationship between Islam and Arabic identities Birth of the “Muslim enemy” was not 9/11, which is what American Military machine puts forth, but predates that – was already an issue when Edward Said was talking about it in 1981
Related to oil politics – demonize the people who have the resource we want (“greedy sheikh”)
Tropes are already embedded and unconscious and easily called on in the media
Reel Bad Arabs – How Hollywood Vilifies a People – most characters in movies over past century are negative stereotypes

• In terms of Christian expansion, since 11th century, Jews were personified as internal enemy (as well as Protestants) and Muslims were the external enemy – the “Other” to be studied – Orientalism – a Eurocentric way of seeing Middle Eastern, Asian, etc – “We” vs “Them”
• “Knowing” the Other at a time whe that also was a part of invading, exploiting – gendered lens is vital because of the discourse of “white men saving brown women of brown men” – linked to justifying militarism
• Contradictory narratives – Eastern women are “docile” vs “alluring” –
• Colonial feminism – we’re about “female liberation” and they are about…
• Media shows Middle East as rubble, not as modern, urban, thriving places
• Questioning what we’re not seeing – what’s outside the frame – what’soutside the 1 dimension
• Another possible reason for this phenomenon of avoidance – it’soverwhelming to think about American military dominance, overshadows all past Empires, continues to expand – context of our sociopolitical moment feels hard to grasp – intentional – who are we at war with? We can’t even answer that
• War on Terror is used to mask our own tactics of Terror
• Militarism has become our “musack” – always in the background – tune in orout
• Talking to high schoolers – we’ve been at war their whole conscious lives,they don’t know what it feels like to not be at war
• Dovetails with Anti-Muslim happening in Europe and India
• Not to overshadow the violence of ISIS – hard to imagine a more ideal enemy– such graphic horror. Their main victims are Muslim and Arabic and are used as an excuse for perpetuating more violence against Muslim and Arabic lives.
• Public health issues in Iraq are now worse than Hiroshima – no public acknowledgement because then there would need to be accountability
• Hebdo bombing used as an excuse for hypocrisy and racism
• Presents a narrative that these acts of violence came out of nowhere
• Not able to close their borders to our military
• A million ways that we disavow our own acts of violenceDiscussion

• The information is so powerful, but so hard to get that info to people –defense mechanisms that prevent us from even allowing the information in – denial, “blind spots” etc because they fear overwhelm or worse at the possibility of letting anyone in
• Presidential elections and the need for someone to make me feel “safe” – everyone outdoing each others arguments for keeping everyone safe – borders, military, etc
• Like a school yard bully – once you start beating people up, if you stop, they are going to come for you – accountability can look a lot of ways, we can’t mak them forgive us
• Podcast Serial – Islamophobic coverage trial of Saied, Taliban, etc

• The liberal version of Islamophobia – rhetoric we are more accustomed to and so we are less critical of it – need to develop our own listening skills – harder to callout/recognize
• If my dad were in this room to listen to this narrative, turning the volume up on the missing narratives, mainstream media is his only window into the world, and he tries to relate to me through bringing up current events, he gets really hooked by the spectacle, I feel overwhelmed by what it takes to build a context around the spectacle – yes, that’s an issue, and so is… But how to do this without knowing everything.
• Not wanting to sound righteous/overbearing/buzzkill
• Ban on journalistic images of war – kept out of our awareness because itleads to anti-war activism
• Totally media blackout of IVAW protest against the war – support the troops,but don’t listen to them if the are against the war
• You know enough – but the expectation of how much we are expected toknow to counter narratives
• Zionism and racism and islamophobia are so rooted into my mom’s identity –it would blow up who she is to change these core beliefs
  o How do we empathize with what it would take to give up these

  beliefs? What do we give them to replace it?
  o Can’t just get rid of it – Can’t get rid of Islamophobia and Zionism until

  we get rid of Anti-Semitism – need to heal core wounds

• What if we did an Inside Out (Pixar movie) about National Identity – coreidentities – 3 pilars of white supremacy – Christian Hegemony
• Can’t talk about these things without talking about economic interests –narrative of Middle East as resource and people as expendable
• How this combines with us being in age of precarity – we are alsoexpendable, and our resistance makes us more expendable – complicity as self-preservation – we used slogan “silence is complicity’ but that’s exactly why they are silent – what about – Your silence will not save you

  Moment to notice Internal process

• Holding breath
• Feeling overwhelmed
• Internal back and forth – defensive with self – noticing my own unexaminedbias
• Frustrated with myself for not being more angry more of the time, not seeingdaily impact
• Just feeling excited that we re talking about this at all

Diving back in
• One big intervention is re-educating about recent history – because of the

tactic of forgetting, national stories of who is friend and enemy, forgetting that Saddam, Bin Laden, etc were “friends” before they were “enemies” – turned into eternal enemies

• Judith Butler piece about erasure of human lives – Precarious Life – Mourning and whose lives are ungrievable – what it means to be undone by loss – human vulnerability – zooms out to make point about armoring up we do to not be vulnerable – it’s institutional – made possible by not being exposed to most lives – to other’s humanity – strategic that we are not undone by all the lives lost – grief can be basis for political community
• Would just go around during height of Iran war fever – showing images of snowy slopes, people at cafes, etc – people were surprised – what needs to be done to our psyches to prepare us to go to war
• How we could relate to people in Paris but can’t relate to people in Middle East – because of cultural and political shaping
• #NotaBugSplat – resistance in Pakistan against drones that call drone strikes bug splats, creating giant murals so they see a child’s face even from a drone
• Gendered piece – patriarchy is everywhere, but we use it often as an excuse for colonial violence.. “Save Muslim women” has become the new “Save the Whales” – silences Muslim women – “Honor killings” often used as proof of their evil, whereas domestic violence here is rationalized, excused – groups are showing that the rates are the same – even after presenting about this, people didn’t even hear and still wanted to talk about “honor killings” – what does international feminist solidarity really look like?
• Maybe we feel powerless to do anything about the violence in our own Western culture, which is why we focus on violence in other cultures
• Hidden here – in the prison system, in the welfare system, in the home
• Cartoon of white Barbie style woman and woman in burka – both looking ateach other in shock and disbelief at the expectations of the other’s culture
• Realizing I don’t have as much awareness of what sexual harassment lookslike in other cultures
• Discussion of dynamic diversity of practices of veiling
• White people lose some of their white privilege when they convert to Islam
• Cooling down of outrage of the violence of Presidents and Empire – just thetoning down of rhetoric was enough for Obama to get a Nobel Prize – what if war rhetoric dies out but war doesn’t – there is no bipartisan when it comes to expansionist militarism – no dissonance
• Preying on people’s fear and disenfranchisement ! scapegoatingStrategies

• Pulling together alternative news sources – Iris is starting this
• Reading group
• Blog with links and resources
• Print out images that are disruptive to mainstream media
• I <3 my Muslim neighbor signs (SURJ)
• Join SURJ listserv – look at their resources and action kits
• IJAN and AROC be aware
• Condemning all of white culture for acts of racist terror
• Using social media to keep aware of anti-war movement / pushing people tochallenge their candidates on these issues

• Liking alternative groups on social media
• Naming these things and seeing them, listening louder
• Backlash against the backlash
• Don’t dismiss Trump – identify other channels for people’sdisenfranchisement – as white people engaging other white people –
• Challenge the thought, not the person or the party
• Be dissonant
• Bring it up where I can – my spheres of influence – practice integrating it intonormal everyday conversations
• Find practices to care for our rage, despair, etc
• Stop listening to that silencing voice – recognize it
• If you can’t come up with a statement, come up with a question – surface it