How the U.S. "War on Terror" Spread Islamophobia Around the World (w/ Khaled Beydoun)

Khaled Beydoun is a professor of law at Wayne State and the author of two books, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear and The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims. American Islamophobia is a definitive analysis of the roots and spread of anti-Muslim animus in the United States, but The New Crusades expands the analysis to look at how the same bigotry manifests around the world, from France to India to China to New Zealand. The new book also shows how the "Global War on Terror" launched by the U.S. after 9/11 helped to fuel anti-Muslim bigotry elsewhere—for instance, China's persecution of Uyghurs deploys justifications and rhetoric lifted straight from the Bush administration. "The way in which the media was disseminating this violent, vile information about Muslims—people like me, who sat across from him—mobilized [the soldier] to enlist in a war in a place that he had no knowledge of. He just knew that he wanted to defend his country, he wanted vengeance, and that these Muslims, these Arabs who were a world away were the culprits of this 9/11 terrorist attack...When he came back from the war, you could tell that he felt deceived by this country...he didn't have the same love for country that he did before he left for that war because he realized how the war had broken people like him and told lies about people like me." — Khaled Beydoun Brown University's Costs of War project has produced a horrifying tally of the human misery caused by the "War on Terror," available here. The interview Nathan mentions with Vietnam veteran W.D. Ehrhart is here (part II).