‘Islamophobia Expert’ at Georgetown: 9/11’s Real Victims Are Muslims

BY ANDREW HARROD

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2022/03/islamophobia-expert-at-georgetown-9-11s-real-victims-are-muslims;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

“The United States government is intent on targeting all marginalized communities,” stated American Muslim activist and author Maha Hilal during a February 23 Georgetown University webinar. Introducing her new book, Innocent until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience since 9/11, she presented America’s post-9/11 defensive War on Terror (WOT) as manifesting America’s inherent evil.

Hilal spoke for Georgetown’s Saudi-founded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU). Her moderator was Mobashra Tazamal, a senior research fellow at ACMCU’s Bridge Initiative, which, in the name of combating “Islamophobia,” defames any and all critics of Islam. Fittingly, Hilal announced that her book examined “how deeply entrenched ‘Islamophobia’ has been in the War on Terror from the very beginning.”

Always the victim, Hilal claimed that the “very intentional targets of the war on terror” were not the Americans and others attacked by jihadists such as Al Qaeda, but Muslims. She marveled at the “uncomfortable fact” that at the American military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “all of those detained have been Muslim,” as if non-Muslims were responsible for 9/11 and its aftermath. “It’s not a coincidence,” she added, affecting an air of profound insight.

Quoting from the book, Tazamal noted Hilal’s rejection of the American “state manufactured and sold the story of good versus evil.” Hilal questioned Americans who accepted government claims that the “terrorists attacked us for our freedom.” “Did the American public have any information to the contrary? Were they reading about what these terrorist organizations actually stated about explanations for why they have attacked the United States?” she asked. She did not explain how reading, for example, about Osama bin Laden’s theocratic demands for destroying America’s close ally Israel or expulsion of American influence from strategically vital Middle Eastern areas would worry Americans any less.

Meanwhile, Muslims themselves suffered “internalized ‘Islamophobia,’” a “form of internalized oppression,” Hilal asserted. “Muslims are absorbing problematic ideas, dominant narratives and tropes about Islam” such as it being “uniquely patriarchal” or “inherently violent,” she stated as if doctrinal concern.

“The United States government is intent on targeting all marginalized communities,” stated American Muslim activist and author Maha Hilal during a February 23 Georgetown University webinar. Introducing her new book, Innocent until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience since 9/11, she presented America’s post-9/11 defensive War on Terror (WOT) as manifesting America’s inherent evil.

Hilal spoke for Georgetown’s Saudi-founded
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU).
Her moderator was Mobashra
Tazamal, a senior research fellow at ACMCU’s Bridge
Initiative, which, in the name of combating “Islamophobia,” defames any and
all critics of Islam. Fittingly, Hilal announced that her book examined “how
deeply entrenched ‘Islamophobia’ has been in the War on Terror from the very
beginning.”

Always the victim, Hilal claimed that the “very intentional targets of the
war on terror” were not the Americans and others attacked by jihadists such as
Al Qaeda, but Muslims. She marveled at the “uncomfortable fact” that at the
American military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “all of those detained have
been Muslim,” as if non-Muslims were responsible for 9/11 and its aftermath.
“It’s not a coincidence,” she added, affecting an air of profound insight.

Quoting from the book, Tazamal noted Hilal’s rejection of the American
“state manufactured and sold the story of good versus evil.” Hilal questioned
Americans who accepted government claims that the “terrorists attacked us for
our freedom.” “Did the American public have any information to the contrary?
Were they reading about what these terrorist organizations actually stated
about explanations for why they have attacked the United States?” she asked.
She did not explain how reading, for example, about Osama bin Laden’s
theocratic demands
for destroying America’s close ally Israel or expulsion
of American influence from strategically vital Middle Eastern areas would worry
Americans any less.

Meanwhile, Muslims themselves suffered “internalized ‘Islamophobia,’” a “form
of internalized oppression,” Hilal asserted. “Muslims are absorbing problematic
ideas, dominant narratives and tropes about Islam” such as it being “uniquely
patriarchal” or “inherently
violent,” she stated as if doctrinal concerns about Islam were
illegitimate. “The constructions of terrorism are also built upon ideas about
Muslims, specifically that they are . . . opposed to normative democratic
values,” she likewise added, oblivious to the sad
lack of stable democracies in the Muslim world.

Descending into moral relativism, Hilal peddled the hackneyed trope that
“there is no agreed-upon definition of terrorism,” as if intentional violence
against civilians for political purposes did not suffice. “You could easily
apply the definitions and the words spoken by government officials to acts of
the United States itself,” but “terrorism is basically what we say it is,” she
claimed. “The United States kills plenty of women and children” who come into
crossfire as the American military targets terrorists, she argued, as if moral
dilemmas of collateral damage made self-defense illegitimate.

Hilal’s moral obtuseness was equally obvious in her analysis of the 2008
conviction in federal court of the Holy Land Foundation for, she noted,
lending “material support for terrorism” to Hamas. Under American law this
charge includes “providing a training on nonviolent tactics to a group that is
constructed as a terrorist organization,” she noted with bewilderment,
rejecting federal law prohibiting aid to killers. Tellingly, she considered
this blanket ban “overly broad and criminalizing,” although admitting the
“fungibility” of this support, such that any aid to terrorist organizations
frees resources for violent activities.

For Hilal such laws are “particularly problematic” in the Hamas-ruled Gaza
Strip. She suggested that organizations such as the Holy Land Foundation merely
donated to Hamas in order to alleviate human suffering, whitewashing how Hamas
regularly diverts any such aid to terrorism against Israelis. This is a
“very calculated way of criminalizing and demonizing anyone who would dare to
support individuals that are in need,” she lied, adding for good measure that
the “U.S. government wants to criminalize Muslims and Muslim communities.”

Accordingly, Hilal called on the U.S. “to dismantle in the war on terror”
effective law enforcement measures such as “surveillance” and “federal
terrorism prosecution.” She decried unspecified “draconian immigration
policies” post-9/11 that sought “to really cement and entrench criminality into
the ways we understand immigration,” even though many of the 9/11 hijackers violated
immigration laws. Her opposition to “militarism and warfare” included the
United States Africa Command (AFRICOM)
as an “institutionalization of bases in the continent of Africa” and a “strong
foothold for further colonialism and imperialism.”

Post-9/11 American actions against jihadist threats simply confirmed
America’s irredeemable evil for Hilal, as she dismissed the concept of
“American exceptionalism.” The WOT “is rooted in the United States’ commitment
to state violence, to imperialism, to neocolonialism,” she argued.
Demonstrating her ignorance of past American conflicts with end dates,
including the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the World Wars, she
asserted that “U.S. wars don’t end. They just form into new wars that preserve
the brutality of wars past.”

The decades after 9/11 provide numerous complex questions concerning
democracies’ self-defense against terrorists, but by hosting Hilal, Georgetown
chose to promote Islamist propaganda. Islamic framing does not make her tale of
a rapacious America and maligned, misunderstood foreigners any more original
than numerous other anti-American screeds dating back to at least the 1960s.
Hilal has yet again given an example of the need to end the enormous waste of
taxpayer and tuition dollars in Middle East studies that produces false
narratives designed to weaken the West’s capacity for self-defense.

Andrew E. Harrod, a Middle East Forum Campus Watch Fellow, freelance researcher, and writer, is a fellow with the Lawfare Project. Follow him on Twitter: @AEHarrod.