The Best Book Yet About American Islamophobia

I reviewed Rozina Ali's 'Seasons of Fury' for the New York Times Book Review

Edited by Sam Thielman

I AM ABOUT to get on a plane to Indiana for a panel discussion at Notre Dame about—what else—9/11 at 25. I've been telling people that while historians talk about the Long 19th Century, I've been going through the Long 9/11 Anniversary. The Notre Dame panel is my last commemoration commitment and it's on the afternoon of October 1. I think it'll be a strong closeout. If there's video, I'll put it in a subsequent edition soonest.

But before I go, today the New York Times Book Review published a reflection* of mine on an important book. Rozina Ali's Seasons of Fury: Four Families And The Rise of Islamophobia in America is so good—unforgettable, as I say in that piece—that I wanted to riff on the stories Ali formidably reports. Longtime readers will recognize my reference to Mohammad Razvi, for instance. That's me trying to collaborate after having my brain set on fire by a book that will be remembered as definitive. But Ali's work, which was swiftly and justly longlisted for a National Book Award, would outperform any effort of mine.

Read the whole review—a sample follows—and then buy her book:  

Law enforcement agents violated Muslim civil rights in the name of keeping America safe, even as American Muslims came under persistent assault. The shop windows of a Brooklyn fabric store owner named Mohammed Razvi were shot out while the ashes of the World Trade Center were still blowing over Coney Island Avenue. A decade later, in Tennessee, unknown assailants burned construction equipment intended for use in the building of a mosque. This past May, two teenage gunmen entered the Islamic Center of San Diego and shot to death three men who stopped them from advancing on the 140 children inside.

Even the specter of violence is life-changing. It happens to the Omars, a Palestinian family of five whose journey Ali arrestingly chronicles (and to whom she gives a pseudonym). Their 50-something neighbor in an unnamed Eastern Seaboard suburb harasses them for years. The American flag the Omars hang outside their home is no shield. They refer to their neighbor only as Mr. Happy, adding to the air of menace looming over these chapters. When the Omars win a protective order against him, which would expire after two years, Mr. Happy laughs his way out of the courtroom.

Seasons of Fury is a much richer text than I could express in one 900-ish-word review. While I don't want to bog down a book about the ordeal of American Muslims in a discussion of American Jews, Ali raises a relevant point, almost in passing, that we in the American Jewish community haven't ever reckoned with. 

When I say almost in passing, I don't mean that as a failing of the book. The subject would require a book of its own to deal with, and frankly, Ali shouldn't have to bear that burden—a Jewish journalist like myself should. But as Ali details, when the FBI began hunting Arabs and then Muslims in the United States after the 1967 Six Day War, its adjuncts were Jewish organizations like the ADL, which performed surveillance on college campuses (and beyond) for the purpose of suppressing advocacy for Palestine. This development is crucial for the descent of Jewish institutions that chose Zionism over their civil-rights mission. We in our own community need to address the disgraceful fact that many institutions acting in our name became witting persecutors of our neighbors.

*THIS WAS A NATURAL, even unavoidable place to use the word review, but since the publication title already contains that word, doing so would have a repetition in the sentence, and that activates every mental illness I possess. I listened to that illness, but this where dogmatic fealty to the accepted rules of good writing reach a point of absurdity. That's why I kept the echo in the dek. If it sounds off to your ear, just imagine it's a Julez Santana punchline. 

We can move on now.

THE U.S. WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ leaves U.S. forces in… Jordan, according to U.S. Central Command. I'll try to summon some reflection and contemplation later, but for now, let's leave it to this woman quoted by the Times:

Many Iraqis who reject the militias have painful memories of the U.S. presence in Iraq. Among them is Awatif al-Azawi, a 57-year-old who blames the United States for the death of her son, who she says was killed in the crossfire between militants and American forces in their hometown, Falluja.

“I used to love the Americans because they delivered us from the oppression of Saddam Hussein,” she said. “We unfortunately later discovered that the U.S. military’s oppression and cruelty were worse than Saddam.”

On the first night that U.S. forces no longer maintain a presence in Iraq, she said, “I will bake a cake at home, light candles and blow them out to celebrate."

Per the Soufan Center, "As the security mission fully transitions to Iraqi control, Washington will leave in place a small, residual force that will continue to help Baghdad combat IS remnants and other threats. However, U.S. officials have not publicly clarified the expected troop levels that will remain in Iraq, or their rules of engagement."

"IN SMEARING ANTI-WAR AMERICANS as 'useful idiots' manipulated by Iran, the Israeli leader [Benjamin Netanyahu] cited a statement from Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, on July 9 [2024] that said Iran's government was driving activism over Gaza. [Senator Chris] Van Hollen received a classified briefing from intelligence officials afterward that provided 'extremely limited examples' of Iranian involvement, contrary to the depiction from Netanyahu… 

"Concerns among American officials about the administration's handling of intelligence grew throughout the war: A senior administration official told me that as analysis and briefings were developed, before they flowed up the chain to Haines, they were often shaped by high-ranking officials Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein, two Biden aides known for trusting Israeli narratives about the war. Some intelligence staff felt pressure to frame material to support the administration's preference of staying close to Israel, two former U.S. officials told me. One described pervasive 'self-censorship' among intelligence officials from junior analysts to those who were involved in assembling the President's Daily Brief… Meanwhile, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) indicated to other government bodies that any inquiries about Israeli compliance with international law would have to come from the Cabinet level, a senior intelligence official and a senior State Department official both told me – thereby adopting a higher standard for colleagues' access to intelligence assessments than the ODNI had for other situations and partner countries." 

– Akbar Shahid Ahmed, Crossing The Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, And Israel's War in Gaza, pp. 219-20

"I want to be clear that everybody who followed this [Gaza] issue from inside the U.S. government—whether it's the military, the intel world, the State Department, USAID—was fully aware of not only everything that was happening in terms of destruction and civilian deaths in Gaza, but also the expected consequences and expected trajectory of the Israeli campaign in Gaza."

– U.S. Army Maj. (ret.) Harrison Mann, former Defense Intelligence Agency Mideast analyst, to FOREVER WARS, Jun. 26, 2024

I bring all this up because former Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, whom I profiled in 2020, has been named the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. More than 74,000 Palestinians—likely many, many more—were unavailable for comment on Haines' commitment to peace. 

EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION FOR MIGRANTS passes the muster of the six Republican Supreme Court justices until a December hearing. It's sickening to consider how many people the administration will rush to disappear between now and then. And perhaps beyond. 

PETE HEGSETH orders the directors of the Pentagon intelligence agencies—or the "Defense Intelligence Enterprise (DIE)"—to "counter foreign threats" to the midterm elections, in a Sept. 22 memo released on Monday: 

Freedom does not happen by accident. It requires constant vigilance, and today, that responsibility falls heavily on the DIE. I am therefore directing the entire DIE to mobilize every authorized asset, capability, and partnership under your command to defend our election infrastructure from foreign malign influence and ensure that every lawful voter can cast their ballot free from foreign intimidation, coercion, or fear. 

"Lawful voter" catches my eye, since the military intelligence enterprise has no role in adjudicating voter eligibility. 

$52.6 MILLION PUMPED into the midterm elections, split amongst the parties as a spread bet, by Anthropic and OpenAI. (But not evenly. OpenAI splits its contributions evenly, but Anthropic favors the Democrats, making them the recipients of $35.1 million to the Republicans' $17.5 million.) The AI oligarchs are only the latest to consider the United States too important to be left to the voters. 

AS PART OF THE Long 9/11 Anniversary, I had a great time on Pod Damn America, which you can check out here. A lot of War on Terror talk, some NO ONE ESCAPES THE DIALECTIC talk, and at the very end an extended elevator pitch for THE DISAPPEARED: A FATHER, A SON AND THE WAR ON TERROR.