The Political Utility of Islamophobia: How the U.S. Right used Islam after 9/11 as a New Field for Domestic Politics

Why, in the aftermath of 9/11, did a segment of U.S. security experts, political elite, media and other institutions classify not just al-Qaeda but the entire religion of Islam as a security threat, thereby countering the prevailing professional consensus and White House policy that maintained a distinction between terrorism and Islam? Why did this oppositional narrative about the threat of Islam expand and even degenerate into warning about the “Islamization of America” by the country’s tiny population of Muslim-Americans? This Islamization threat became sufficiently convincing that conservative legislators in two dozen states introduced bills to prevent the spread of Islamic law, or sharia, and a Republican Presidential front-runner exclaimed, “I believe Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it”!

This case study of U.S. popular security discourse on Islam in the decade after 9/11 deepens the critical characterizations of this phenomenon as “Islamophobia,” the “new Orientalism,” the “new McCarthyism,” and so on. The analysis distinctively reveals how this “threat” discourse could and did function as a deliberate strategy of the more entrepreneurial segments of the U.S. conservative movement, who—in the emotion-laden wake of 9/11—seized Islam as another opportune field of struggle to advance their ongoing project of cultural politics. The study thus challenges our basic assumption that security knowledge is inherently objective description that corresponds to reality. It instead reveals that all security issues have a much more subjective and constructed nature, with inherent political utility, and undergirded by apparatuses of political power.

Professor David Belt, since 2008, has served as a full-time faculty member at National Intelligence University, Washington DC—the fully accredited graduate institution for the seventeen agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. There, he has led courses and supervised thesis research in the social analysis of strategic-level, security issues within Muslim communities worldwide, especially the broader Middle East. Concurrently, Dr. Belt for nearly two-years led the 23-member nation Global Futures Forum’s project on Political Violence and Extremism, served two years as NIU’s first Chair/Head of the Regional Issues Department, and created the university’s Middle East concentration and its present six courses. Previously, David served as Assistant Professor, National Security Studies, National Defense University. Concurrently, from 2005 through 2008, he led the 400-member invitation-only global community of interest on countering violent extremism, editing its bi-weekly newsletter, “Containing al-Qaedaism,” and developed and taught the university’s first national security professional certified course on that topic. In a former military career, Captain Belt (ret.) also served twenty-six years on active-duty in various high-risk and combat operational and executive-level leadership positions within the U.S. Navy’s non-SEAL Special Operations Officer community. He is a member of the class of 1982, U.S. Naval Academy, earned his Master’s in Security Studies and Strategic Resources at the Eisenhower School, National Defense University, and was awarded his PhD from Virginia Tech’s School of Public and International Affairs, National Capital Region campus.