Islamophobia Neg

NoteWe* tried hard to make this neg file one that provides good options for both T/Framework crowd and detailed/specific arguments for various Ks. Our agenda isn’t secret – we’d like to encourage substantive engagement with the thesis of the aff.

Learning to do this at camp is great, and may have equal or even greater utility than practicing a strategy like the Cap K you’re already more familiar with. If you’ve ever thought “what do I do vs. a non-USFG K aff?” our goal was to make that answer as easy as possible to answer.

There are a few distinct strategies you could combine and they all work vs the non-USFG version of the aff:

T/Framework Terror DA + Case Speaking for Others K of Islam (this isn’t “Islam bad,” but rather it’s “Kundnani/Kumar (primary aff

authors) treat all Ks of Islam as forms of islamophobia, that’s messed up. It’s also a net benefit to the Word PIC.)

Word PIC out of “Islamophobia” Very good links to Foucault and Ks of anti-blackness – could be useful on the

case even if you don’t read the off-case positions

There is some tension between potential strategies that you should think through as you prepare your strategy. For example, both the Word PIC and Speaking for Others Ks have “discourse first” components that might not work with your framework arguments. This doesn’t mean they both shouldn’t be in the 1nc, but it may be wiser to choose one of those options + case in the block than to go for both.

*Thank you to Emily Chen from GBN, Henry Ferolie from Walter Payton, Riley Franklin from Dulles, Emily Hall from Interlake, Emily Merz from La Costa Canyon, Tamara Morrison from University Prep, Mitchell Pickard from Barstow, Hadar Regev from Johns Creek, Ashton Smith from Maine East and Janai Williams from Groves for all of their hard work in producing this file. Future waves to come.

Case

—Note—

Most of this is straight forward but two big picture notes quickly –

-- It’s especially important to answer the case with K affs. Central to the 2ac response to everything else (T, DAs, other Ks, etc.) is the 1ac. So many teams just ignore it and it’s dangerous to grant the aff 100% of the aff and only attack it marginally on solvency (i.e. saying USFG action would solve better on the T version without answering whether the aff solves)

-- It’s not terribly difficult to assemble a case frontline vs. a K aff, esp one with a major author (this first wave leans heavily on Arun Kundnani, future waves will involve more Deepa Kumar, etc.)

If there’s a common author it’s not hard to go to your 2ac blocks and repurpose your K answers to deal with it.

That said, Kundnani is relatively new to the scene, so our approach was to research book reviews that challenged the thesis of his work. Em Chen went HAM here.

This stuff is some of the most irreplaceable stuff in the 1nc—make time for it. If you have to shorten your off case positions or, perhaps better, slice one, it’s worth it.

Solvency F/L—1nc **note – the first card is also in the terror DA link under CT good**

Kundnani’s way off on root cause and the thesis of the aff is bankrupt – history proves Rashi, 14—freelance journalist and writer for the Huffington Post (Tanjil, 3/16/14, "‘The Muslims are Coming!’, by Arun Kundnani", Financial Times, www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/af5ef4c6-aa15-11e3-8bd6-00144feab7de.html)//twemchen

**edited for language

In truth, counterterrorism policies targeting Muslims are a legitimate response to homegrown extremism , from the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby to the 366 (by one count) British citizens waging jihad in Syria. Furthermore, the victims of the 2005

London bombings bear witness to the reality of radicalism bred at home . At best, Kundnani’s argument is compelling in its dissection of governments’ disproportional responses. He estimates the FBI has one counter-terrorism agent per 94 Muslims in the US, which approaches a Stasi-esque ratio of spies to citizens. He shows that authorities keep drawing spurious lists of suspected radicals; one in the UK included almost 300 children under 15. A commonplace at the core of Kundnani’s critique is

that radicalism is mainly the byproduct of western foreign policy. “Religion had nothing to do with this,” according to Kundnani, citing a conspirator in the London bombings. This view is undermined by the existence of two generations of British Muslims predating the war on terro r – men who fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s and in Bosnia in the 1990s. The diminution of religion’s role in stoking radicalism is as inaccurate as UK Labour politicians’ denial that wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan acted even as recruiting sergeants. Kundnani scrutinises responses to terrorism better than outlining its causes. He probes the mutations of liberalism in the face of Islam, resulting in “war on terror liberals” for whom liberalism “became an ideology of total war”, from the UK Labour party’s interventionist foreign policy to Martin Amis’s innumerate paranoia about Muslim birth rates. Liberals hold up the Enlightenment, conservatives “campaign to defend Judeo-Christian identity” – both banners

explicitly excluding Muslims; both groups inclined, Kundnani writes, to see “terrorists motivated by fanaticism inherent to Islam”. History offers correctives to these narratives , demonstrating varieties of Islam being as rooted in rationalism as the Enlightenment; the Enlightenment being as tied to terror as Islam (the word “terrorism” itself was first used during The Terror of the Enlightenment-inspired French revolution). The Muslims are Coming! lacks optimism but there is every reason to be- lieve “Muslim” might one day be suffixed to “Judeo-Christian” when describing the west’s culture and values. Note how one prominent French intellectual writes about Europe’s growing population of a certain religious minority: “All of them are born with raging fanaticism in their hearts.” The author of these unenlightened remarks? Voltaire. His subject? The Jews.

The 1AC’s approach to criticizing Western governments only re-creates the problemBerger, 14—Associate Professor in International Security, PhD in Political Science (Lars, 3/27/14, "The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror, by Arun Kundnani", Times Higher Education: World University Rankings, https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/the-muslims-are-coming-islamophobia-extremism-and-the-domestic-war-on-terror-by-arun-kundnani/2012227.article)//twemchen

One of the central theme s in Arun Kundnani’s critique of what he describes as the domestic “war on terror” in the UK and the

US is the apparent neglect of , or even taboo against, discussing the role played by the foreign policies of Western governments in bringing about the horrific acts of violence witnessed on the streets of London in July 2005 and May 2013. Kundnani, a US-based scholar of terrorism, is adamant that “what governments call extremism is to a large degree a

product of their own wars”. However, there are a number of theoretical and methodological problems with his account . Kundnani is right to highlight methodological concerns about existing studies of Islamist radicalisation, many of which rely on a small number of cases and fail to include control groups of people who share radical ideologies but nevertheless choose not to engage in political violence. But this is not a new insight. Indeed, researchers across Europe have already published plenty of insightful critiques of the

theoretical assumptions and methodological approaches of the radicalisation literature. Worse, Kundnani commits the same mistakes when he presents no theoretical justification for his choice of case studies, and fails to explain why the vast majority of Muslims who disagree with the West ern foreign policies he sees as potential root causes have not become engaged in political violence . If we look at public opinion polls from across the Muslim world, including Muslim communities in the West, support for violence against Western civilians stands, on average, at between 5 and 10 per cent. But if Kundnani’s assertions are correct, this number should be much higher, given that in some Muslim countries, overwhelming

majorities of up to 90 per cent criticise the policies of the US and the West. THERE IS A DANGER THAT WESTERN GOVERNMENTS CAN END UP TELLING MUSLIMS WHAT THE ‘CORRECT’ INTERPRETATION OF ISLAM IS In

fact, it is not perceptions of US foreign policies with respect to Israel or Middle Eastern petroleum resources that shape approval of terrorist violence against US civilians, but the rejection of US culture and some of its most prominent manifestations, such as freedom of expression. This finding may go against the conventional wisdom that Kundnani seems to wish to repackage here as his own insights, but it is quite comprehensible in light of the groundbreaking analysis of anti-Americanisms by scholars Peter Katzenstein and Robert Keohane, in which they differentiate between a view that assesses US foreign policies on their own terms and a view that regards those same policies as reflecting the fundamentally evil nature of US society. When he criticises the Islamophobia peddled by right-wing US and UK media and politicians, Kundnani is more convincing, as is his argument that Western counterterrorism efforts, particularly in the US, should pay greater attention to the more widespread threat of right-wing violence. He is also right to highlight the inherently problematic nature of the attempts of various Western governments to meddle in the politics and discourses of Muslim communities in the name of fighting terrorism. It is important to not turn a blind eye towards radical discourses that can be used to

justify political violence against civilians. But there is a danger that Western governments, in an attempt to address the cacophony of voices typical of the decentralised, pluralistic religious discourses in many (Sunni) Muslim communities around the world, can end up telling Muslims what the “correct” interpretation of Islam is . But once again, these are issues that have also already received considerable academic attention, with plenty of excellent analysis ranging from peer-reviewed publications to countless undergraduate essays. In short, Kundnani’s critique of hostility towards Muslims by some Western media and politicians and of Western governments’ interaction with their Muslim communities is convincing, although not wholly original. His highly ideological insistence on the link between Western foreign policies and Islamist terrorism is neither.

Proximate causes outweigh—their epistemology is reductionist and relies on faulty comparisonsAlibhai-Brown, 14—Ugandan-born British journalist and author, research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, founder member of British Muslims for Secular Democracy (Yasmin, 3/7/14, "The Muslims are Coming! by Arun Kundnani, book review: Nothing to fear but Islam itself", The Independent, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-muslims-are-coming-by-arun-kundnani-book-review-nothing-to-fear-but-islam-itself-9174918.html)//twemchen

Arun Kundnani, now a professor at New York University, used to edit Race and Class, the quarterly house journal of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR). For over 40 years the IRR has archived black history, documented and protested against British racism, analysed politics, empire and globalisation. Many of us who became resolute egalitarians were awakened and inspired by the Institute's intellectual activist, A Sivanandan (Siva), now in his eighties. Kundnani, his young disciple, has taken up IRR causes with renewed vigour as they become ever more pressing and concomitantly deeply unpopular. In our times anti-racism ( aka "political correctness gone mad") has been expelled from public discourse and critics of capitalism are considered mad, bad or dangerous. In The End of Tolerance: Racism in the 21st Century (2007) Kundnani broke these sanctions. His template was stridently post-colonial, his politics boldly left wing. It was a well evidenced, powerful

study; a classic. This one is equally well researched and written, but much less persuasive. The topic is vital; burning. Since 9/11, Muslims have had to pay over and over for crimes committed by fanatic Islamist militants. Our human rights have been snatched; we are watched, hundreds of thousands of our people tortured and murdered by western states or their Muslim stooges. In the "war on terror" anything goes. Kundnani exposes official duplicities and authorised illegal practices including intimidation, the use of agent provocateurs and extra-judicial killings. He tells the stories of the unheard and unseen. Shamuir Rahman, 19, for example, was recruited by the NYPD to push young Muslims into making inflammatory anti-American statements, part of the force's 'create and capture'

strategy; Imam Luqman, suspected of advocating insurrections was not tried but shot dead by FBI agents in Detroit. This is the new wild west, cowboy justice. The UK incarcerates Muslims without any legal process. They, the unnamed, are in a black hole, and don't know if or when they will be charged or released. Facts and figures in the book scythe through presumptions and prejudices. I didn't know that murders in the last decade by the far right exceed those by Jihadis. Or that Republican congressman Peter King who summoned US Muslims to McCarthy-type hearings, was a keen and shouty fundraiser for the IRA in the 1980s. The author also scrutinises various anti-radicalisation government initiatives: some laughable, some Kafkaesque, others reminiscent of Maoist re-education programmes. With so many books written by liberals and Neocons on the "Muslim peril", it

is a relief to have an intelligent counter-narrative: "One of the key arguments of this book is that to comprehend the causes of so-called jihadist terrorism, we need to pay as much attention to Western state violence and the identity politics that sustains it, as we do to Islamicist ideology. What governments call extremism is to a

large degree a product of their own wars." However, although many of his arguments and details are incontrovertible, I can't go

all the way with Kundnani's conclusions and rationales . Some claims are simply ideological chants or fixations and careless connections are made . The book shifts blithely between Britain and the US . They may be deep allies, but they have different histories and values . From the age of exploration, the UK has had contact with Muslims, for better and worse. Americans, even now, are clueless about the Muslim nations, Islam and its adherents. Also problematic is Kundnani's post- colonial, anti-capitalist framework , which cannot fully explain the traumas of Muslims worldwide. (By the way, Prophet Mohammed worked for his merchant wife, a capitalist). Their aspirations and lives are shattered by "Islamaphobia", occidental domination, aggression and interventions and also corrupt Muslim politicians, low education and technological attainments, rejection of modernity and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states which systematically spread hardline, anti-female, Islamic

Puritanism. Muslims are repressed by external and internal brute forces , turning some to rage and murder. Kundnani disregards inconvenient truths , is dismissive of psychological and social reasons for radicalisation, itself a "myth" in his eyes . He is good on the socio-economic history of Muslims in Britain :

why they came, the jobs they took up, unemployment, racism, resistance and deep disillusionment. But doesn't explain why other minorities who have the same troubled history have not become brutal avengers . The murder of Stephen Lawrence is brought in for reasons that are not clear. So too, an attack in 2000 on two Asian brothers at a nightclub in Leeds. Two Leeds United footballers were accused, one convicted but

not jailed. We know people of colour are subjected to racist attacks but can't be sure that religious hatred led to the assaults on the brothers. Is Kundnani saying Muslims face different or the same dangers as other black and Asian people in Britain? If Muslims face particular hatreds – which I believe many do – the author needed to focus on those and leave out the victimisation of non- Muslims or explain better than he does, how they fit into his analysis of "Islamaphobia" which means the fear and loathing of Muslims. In my view then, this is a gripping exposition of how the west has made a post-communist

enemy and, in some ways, ignited Islamicist terrorism. But Muslims are not simply put upon. They have agency and some spread evil. To complete the story you will have to read the feminist Egyptian writer Nawal el-Saadawi or Samir Kassir, friend of Robert Fisk, the Lebanese author of Being Arab. Kassir was blown up not by Western assassins but by Arab brothers for being honest.

**note – next card is also part of the Islam K**

The radicalization thesis is false—it’s ignores the intricacies of the Muslim culture and fails to analyze extremism globallyRashid, 14—a Research Associate in the Sociology Department at the University of Manchester, PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics (Dr. Naaz, May 2014, "Book Review: The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror by Arun Kundnani", The London School of Economics and Political Science, blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2014/07/08/book-review-the-muslims-are-coming-islamophobia-extremism-and-the-domestic-war-on-terror-by-arun-kundnani/)//twemchen

The issue of terrorism continues to dominate the news whether in relation to the allegations of extremism in Birmingham schools or the long term repercussions of young British Muslims going to fight in Syria and Iraq. What links these two stories is the common sense understanding about how people come to commit acts of

terrorist violence. In his new book, The Muslims are Coming, Arun Kundnani’s primary focus is the ‘radicalization thesis’ which underpins the moral panics underlying both phenomena. That is, the idea that people become radicalised through exposure to ‘extremist’ ideologies which can then lead them to engage in acts of terrorism. Through his rigorously researched analysis of preventive counterterrorism measures in the UK and US, Kundnani skilfully and articulately deconstructs the central tenets of these dominant discourses regarding radicalisation and extremism. Kundnani’s stated aims are to consider: firstly, how Islamic ideology has come to be regarded as the root cause of terrorism; and secondly, that acceptance of Muslims as citizens is predicated on them (us) distancing themselves from any particular set of ideological beliefs. He argues that “official and popular understandings of terrorism are more a matter of ideological projection and fantasy than of objective assessment.” (p. 17). He suggests that the events in both Boston and Woolwich fit the “current war on terror paradigm of young Muslim men becoming radicalised through their exposure to Islamist ideology”. This is despite the fact that in both instances, although not acting entirely alone, the perpetrators were amateurs with no connection to wider networks or terrorist cells. The transatlantic comparison allows Kundnani to showcase his detailed scholarship of policies, both in theory and in practice, weaving together the continuities and parallels between each country’s experiences. Common to both countries is the underlying belief in ‘the myth of radicalization’. As

Kundnani writes, the term was little used prior to 2001, whereas by 2004 it “had acquired its new meaning of a psychological or theological process by which Muslims move toward extremist views”; so much so that by 2010 over 100 articles on the topic were being published in peer-reviewed academic journals each year (p 119). Despite this wealth of research, however, Kundnani argues that the underlying ideological assumptions mean that radicalization scholars systematically fail to address the reality of the political conflicts they claim to understand. Kundnani delineates the divergent histories of the UK and US’s respective Muslim populations in the context of very different, albeit occasionally intertwined, histories of (neo)imperialism, migration, and racial politics. He goes on to suggest, however, that 2005 represented a watershed year in which the 7/7 bombings in London brought the UK into close alignment with the US. As a result, the substantive historical, socio-political and demographic differences fell away and the UK and the US were united, not only in their ideologically inspired military encroachments, but also in their preventive counter terrorism measures against ‘home grown’ terrorism. This is perhaps where it could be argued that the book’s

weakness lies. Kundnani’s scrupulous attention to detail that so enriches his critique of the common sense logic regarding the relationship between radicalization and terrorism is absent in this analysis. If, as he argues, the fundamental flaw with the radicalization thesis is its failure to take into account the wider socio- and geo-political context within which such political violence occurs, then equally, in order to assess the outcome of policies based on it , the localised differences between and within the US and UK surely warrant more nuanced analysis. At times he does address US-specific contexts such as the more overt tactics of create and capture used there, which almost amounts to the entrapment of potential terrorists. He also writes a coruscating indictment of Obama’s term in office in which the militaristic jingoism of George Bush has become dangerously banal, bureaucratic, and routine, such that the practice and function of the anti-Muslim racism which has been fostered has rendered invisible “the

violence of the US empire” (p 14). On balance, however, the differences between the two countries are flattened out and the differential country-specific impacts of such initiatives remain somewhat unexplored. In the British context for example, the Prevent agenda cannot be assessed in isolation from the community cohesion agenda which preceded it and broader debates on multiculturalism and Britishness which foreground it. An underexplored side effect of the Prevent agenda in the UK is its impact on ‘inter community’ relations given the particularities of the postcolonial British experience. Sikhs have not, for example, been widely ‘misrecognised’ as Muslims in the UK as they have in the US (where the ‘Don’t Freak I’m a Sikh’ campaign emerged). Similarly, it is not clear whether Sikhs in the US have been drawn to far-right groups premised on an anti-Muslim platform as has occurred in the case of the BNP and the EDL in the UK. Given Kundnani’s previous work for the anti-racist left organisation the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) as well as his earlier publications, such as The End of Tolerance and Spooked! – his analysis of such differences would undoubtedly have been

astute. Furthermore, the book does not situate the radicalisation debate in relation to the wider cultural pathologisation of Muslims in both countries as well as across the globe, for example, in relation to Muslim women, and the way in which these discourses are so heavily gendered. Nonetheless, given the virulent tenacity with which the violent extremism/radicalisation/counterterrorism discourse matrix permeates the public policy imaginary, in spite of little evidence to support the conceptual framework which underlies it, the book is a very timely intervention. Kundnani draws on a wide range of material to support his case, ranging from the work of Arendt to the analysis of populist representations of terrorism in TV series such as Homeland and South Park. There is also a wealth of research into and analysis of particular cases of counter terrorist activity and interventions which can challenge the established orthodoxies prevailing on both sides of the Atlantic (although these in depth examples might have benefitted from a more conventional bibliography and index). The Muslims are Coming should be required reading for officials and Ministers in the Home Office, Department of Communities & Local Government, the Department of Education, and the Department for Homeland Security, as well as for

political commentators everywhere. However, for those engaged in critical studies of the racialised (and gendered) politics of the war on terror, fewer examples and more critical, country-specific analysis of the impact of such measures would have been welcome.

Structural Violence F/L—1nc Structural violence decreasing nowGoklany 9—Worked with federal and state governments, think tanks, and the private sector for over 35 years. Worked with IPCC before its inception as an author, delegate and

reviewer. Negotiated UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Managed the emissions trading program for the EPA. Julian Simon Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, visiting fellow at AEI, winner of the Julian Simon Prize and Award. PhD, MS, electrical engineering, MSU. B.Tech in electrical engineering, Indian Institute of Tech. (Indur, “Have increases in population, affluence and technology worsened human and environmental well-being?” 2009, http://www.ejsd.org/docs/HAVE_INCREASES_IN_POPULATION_AFFLUENCE_AND_TECHNOLOGY_WORSENED_HUMAN_AND_ENVIRONMENTAL_WELL-BEING.pdf)

Although global population is no longer growing exponentially, it has quadrupled since 1900. Concurrently, affluence (or GDP per capita) has sextupled, global economic product (a measure of aggregate consumption) has increased 23-fold and carbon dioxide has increased over 15-fold (Maddison 2003; GGDC 2008;

World Bank 2008a; Marland et al. 2007).4 But contrary to Neo- Malthusian fears, average human well-being, measured by any objective indicator,

has never been higher. Food supplies, Malthus’ original concern, are up worldwide. Global food supplies per capita increased from 2,254 Cals/day

in 1961 to 2,810 in 2003 (FAOSTAT 2008). This helped reduce hunger and malnutrition worldwide. The proportion of the population in the

developing world, suffering from chronic hunger declined from 37 percent to 17 percent between 1969–71 and 2001–

2003 despite an 87 percent population increase (Goklany 2007a; FAO 2006). The reduction in hunger and malnutrition,

along with improvements in basic hygiene, improved access to safer water and sanitation, broad adoption of vaccinations , antibiotics, pasteurization and other public health measures, helped reduce mortality and increase life expectancies . These improvements first became evident in today’s developed countries in the mid- to late-1800s and started to spread in earnest to developing countries

from the 1950s. The infant mortality rate in developing countries was 180 per 1,000 live births in the early 1950s; today it is 57. Consequently, global life expectancy, perhaps the single most important measure of human well-being, increased from 31 years in 1900 to 47 years in the

early 1950s to 67 years today (Goklany 2007a). Globally, average annual per capita incomes tripled since 1950 . The proportion of the world’s population outside of high-income OECD countries living in absolute povertyaverage consumption of less

than $1 per day in 1985 International dollars adjusted for purchasing power parity), fell from 84 percent in 1820 to 40 percent in 1981 to 20

percent in 2007 (Goklany 2007a; WRI 2008; World Bank 2007). Equally important, the world is more literate and better educated. Child labor in low income countries declined from 30 to 18 percent between 1960 and 2003. In most countries, people are freer politically, economically and socially to pursue their goals as they see fit. More people choose their own rulers, and have freedom of expression. They are more likely to live under rule of law, and less likely to be arbitrarily deprived of life, limb and property. Social and professional mobility has never been greater. It is easier to transcend the bonds of caste, place, gender, and other accidents of birth in the lottery of life. People work fewer hours, and have more money and better health to enjoy their leisure time (Goklany 2007a). Figure 3 summarizes the U.S. experience over the 20th century with respect to growth of population, affluence, material, fossil fuel energy and chemical consumption, and life expectancy. It indicates that population has multiplied 3.7-fold; income, 6.9-fold; carbon dioxide emissions, 8.5-fold; material use, 26.5-fold; and organic chemical use, 101-fold. Yet its life expectancy increased from 47 years to 77 years and infant mortality (not shown) declined from over 100 per 1,000 live births to 7 per 1,000. It is also important to note that not only are people living longer, they are healthier. The disability rate for seniors declined 28 percent between 1982 and 2004/2005 and, despite better diagnostic tools, major diseases (e.g., cancer, and heart and respiratory diseases) occur 8–11 years later now than a century ago (Fogel 2003; Manton et al. 2006). If similar figures could be constructed for other countries, most would indicate qualitatively similar trends, especially after 1950, except Sub-Saharan Africa and the erstwhile members of the Soviet Union. In the latter two cases, life expectancy, which had increased following World War II, declined after the late 1980s to the early 2000s, possibly due poor economic performance compounded, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, by AIDS, resurgence of malaria, and tuberculosis due mainly to poor governance (breakdown of public health services) and other manmade causes (Goklany 2007a, pp.66–69, pp.178–181, and references therein). However, there are signs of a turnaround, perhaps related to increased economic growth since the early 2000s, although this could, of course, be a temporary blip (Goklany 2007a; World Bank 2008a). Notably, in most areas of the world, the healthadjusted life expectancy (HALE), that is, life expectancy adjusted downward for the severity and length of time spent by the average individual in a less-than-healthy condition, is greater now than the unadjusted life expectancy was 30 years ago. HALE for the China and India in 2002, for instance, were 64.1 and 53.5 years, which exceeded their unadjusted life expectancy of 63.2 and 50.7 years in 1970–1975 (WRI 2008). Figure 4, based on cross country data, indicates that contrary to Neo-Malthusian fears, both life expectancy and infant mortality improve with the level of affluence (economic development) and time, a surrogate for technological change (Goklany 2007a). Other indicators of human well-being that improve over time and as affluence rises are: access to safe water and sanitation (see below), literacy, level of education, food supplies per capita, and the prevalence of malnutrition (Goklany 2007a, 2007b).

Structural violence doesn’t escalateRobert Hinde and Lea Pulkkinnen, Cambridge psychology professor and University of Jyväskylä psychology professor, 2000, DRAFT Background Paper for Working Group 1: HUMAN AGGRESSIVENESS AND WAR, 50th Pugwash Conference On Science and World Affairs: "Eliminating the Causes of War" Queens' College, Cambridge, http://www.pugwash.org/reports/pac/pac256/WG1draft1.htm

People are capable of perpetrating the most terrible acts of violence on their fellows. From before recorded history humans have killed humans, and violence is potentially present in every society. There is no escaping the fact that the capacity to develop a propensity for violence is part of human nature. But that does not

mean that aggression is inevitable: temporary anger need not give rise to persistent hostility, and hostility need not give rise to acts of

aggression. And people also have the capacity to care for the needs of others, and are capable of acts of great altruism and self-sacrifice. A subsidiary aim of

this workshop is to identify the factors that make aggressive tendencies predominate over the cooperative and compassionate ones. Some degree of

conflict of interest is often present in relationships between individuals, in the relations between groups of individuals within states,

and in the relations between states: we are concerned with the factors that make such conflicts escalate into violence.

The answer to that question depends critically on the context. While there may be some factors in common, the bases of individual aggressiveness are very different from those involved in mob violence, and they differ yet again from the factors influencing

the bomb-aimer pressing the button in a large scale international war. In considering whether acts which harm others are a consequence of the aggressive motivation of individuals, it is essential to recognise the diversity of such acts, which include interactions between individuals, violence between groups, and wars of the WW2 type. We shall see that, with increasing social complexity, individual aggressiveness becomes progressively less important, but other aspects of human nature come to contribute to group phenomena. Although research on human violence has focussed too often on the importance of one factor or

another, it is essential to remember that violence always has multiple causes , and the interactions between the causal factors remain largely unexplored.

Shocks to the system are the ONLY propensity for conflict—liberal norms have eradicated the escalation of warfare and structural violence—every field study provesJOHN HORGAN 9 is Director of the Center for Science at Stevens Institute of Technology, former senior writer at Scientific American, B.A. from Columbia and an M.S. from Columbia “The End of the Age of War,” Dec 7, http://www.newsweek.com/id/225616/page/1

The economic crisis was supposed to increase violence around the world. The truth is that we are now living in one of the most peaceful periods since war first arose 10 or 12 millennia ago. The relative calm of our era , say scientists who study warfare in history and

even prehistory, belies the popular, pessimistic notion that war is so deeply rooted in our nature that we

can never abolish it. In fact, war seems to be a largely cultural phenomenon, which culture is now helping us eradicate. Some scholars now even cautiously speculate that the era of traditional war—fought by two uniformed, state-sponsored armies—might be

drawing to a close. "War could be on the verge of ceasing to exist as a substantial phenomenon," says John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University.¶ That might sound crazy, but consider: if war is defined as a conflict between two or more nations resulting in at least 1,000

deaths in a year, there have been no wars since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and no wars between major industrialized powers since World War II. Civil wars have also declined from their peak in the early 1990s, when fighting tore apart Rwanda, the Balkans, and other regions. Most armed conflicts now consist of low-level guerrilla campaigns, insurgencies, and terrorism—what Mueller calls the "remnants of

war."¶ These facts would provide little comfort if war's remnants were nonetheless killing millions of people—but they're not. Recent studies reveal a clear downward trend . In 2008, 25,600 combatants and civilians were killed as a direct result of armed conflicts, according to the University of Uppsala Conflict Data Program in Sweden. Two thirds of these deaths took place in just three trouble spots: Sri Lanka (8,400), Afghanistan (4,600), and Iraq (4,000).¶ Uppsala's figures exclude deaths from "one-sided conflict," in which combatants deliberately kill unarmed civilians, and "indirect" deaths from war-related disease

and famine, but even when these casualties are included, annual war-related deaths from 2004 to 2007 are still low by historical standards. Acts of

terrorism, like the 9/11 attacks or the 2004 bombing of Spanish trains, account for less than 1 percent of fatalities. In contrast, car

accidents kill more than 1 million people a year.¶ The contrast between our century and the previous one is striking . In the second half of the 20th century, war killed as many as 40 million people, both directly and indirectly, or 800,000 people a year, according to Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland. He estimates that 190 million people, or 3.8 million a year, died as a result of wars and state--sponsored genocides during the cataclysmic first half of the century. Considered as a percentage of population, the body count of the 20th century is comparable to that of blood-soaked earlier cultures, such as the Aztecs, the Romans, and the Greeks.¶ By far the most warlike societies are those that preceded civilization. War killed as many as 25 percent of all pre-state people, a rate 10 times higher than that of the 20th century, estimates anthropologist Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois. Our ancestors were not always so bellicose, however: there is virtually no clear-cut evidence of lethal group aggression by humans prior to 12,000 years ago. Then, "warfare appeared in the evolutionary trajectory of an increasing number of societies around the world," says anthropologist Jonathan Haas of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. He attributes the emergence of warfare to several factors: growing population density, environmental stresses that diminished food sources, and the separation of people into culturally distinct groups. "It is only after the cultural foundations have been laid for distinguishing 'us' from 'them,' " he says, "that raiding, killing, and burning appear as a complex response to the external stress of environmental problems."¶ Early civilizations, such as those founded in Mesopotamia and Egypt 6,000 years ago, were extremely warlike. They assembled large armies and began inventing new techniques and technologies for killing, from horse-drawn chariots

and catapults to bombs. But nation-states also developed laws and institutions for resolving disputes nonviolently, at least within their borders. These cultural

innovations helped reduce the endless, tit-for-tat feuding that plagued pre-state societies.¶ A host of other cultural factors may explain the more

recent drop - off in international war and other forms of social violence. One is a surge in democratic rather than totalitarian governance . Over the past two centuries democracies such as the U.S. have rarely if ever fought each other .

Democracy is also associated with low levels of violence within nations . Only 20 democratic nations existed at the end of World War II; the number has since more than quadrupled. Yale historian Bruce Russett contends that international institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union also contribute to this "democratic peace" phenomenon by fostering economic interdependence. Advances in civil rights for women may also be

making us more peaceful. As women's education and economic opportunities rise , birthrates fall, decreasing demands on governmental and medical services and depletion of natural resources, which can otherwise lead to social unrest.¶ Better public health is another contributing factor. Over the past century, average life spans have almost doubled , which could make us less willing to risk our lives by engaging in war and other forms of violence, proposes Harvard psychologist{s} Steven Pinker. At the same time, he points out, globalization and communications have made us increasingly interdependent on, and empathetic toward, others outside of our immediate "tribes."¶ Of course, the world remains a dangerous place , vulnerable to disruptive, unpredictable events like terrorist attacks. Other looming threats to peace include climate change, which could produce droughts and endanger our food supplies; overpopulation; and the spread of violent religious extremism, as embodied by Al Qaeda. A global financial meltdown or ecological catastrophe could plunge us back into the kind of violent, Hobbesian chaos that plagued many pre--state societies thousands of years ago. "War is not intrinsic to human nature, but neither is peace," warns the political scientist Nils Petter

Gleditsch of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo.¶ So far the trends are positive . If they continue , who knows?

World peace—the dream of countless

Structural violence obscures analysis necessary to solve the impact.Boulding, ’77 Kenneth, Prof Univ. of Michigan and UC Boulder, Journal of Peace Research; 14; 75 p. Boulding p. 83-4

Finally, we come to the great Galtung metaphors of ’structural violence’ and ’positive peace’. They are metaphors rather than models, and for that very reason are suspect. Metaphors always imply models and metaphors have much more persuasive power than models

do, for models tend to be the preserve of the specialist. But when a metaphor implies a bad model it can be very dangerous , for it is

both persuasive and wrong . The metaphor of structural violence I would argue falls right into this category. The metaphor is that poverty,

deprivation, ill health, low expectations of life, a condition in which more than half the human race lives, is ’like’ a thug beating up the victim and taking his money away from him in the street, -or it is ’like’ a conqueror stealing the land of the people and reducing them to slavery. The implication is that poverty and its associated ills are the fault of the thug or the conqueror and the solution is to do away with thugs and conquerors. While there is some truth in the metaphor, in the modem world at least there is not very much. Violence, whether of the streets and the home, or of the guerilla, of the police, or of the armed forces, is a very different phenomenon from poverty. The processes which create and sustain poverty are not at all like the processes which create and sustain violence, although like everything else in the world, everything is somewhat related to everything else. There is a very real problem of the structures which lead to violence, but

unfortunately Galtung’s metaphor of structural violence as he has used it has diverted attention from the

problem . Violence in the behavioral sense, that is, somebody actually doing damage to somebody else and trying to make them worse off, is a ’threshold’

phenomenon, rather like the boiling over of a pot. The temperature under a pot can rise for a long time without its boiling over, but at some threshold boiling over

will take place. The study of the structures which underlie violence are a very important and much neglected part of peace research and indeed of social science in general. Threshold phenomena like violence are difficult to study because they represent ’breaks’ in the system rather than uniformities. Violence, whether between persons or organizations, occurs when the ’strain’ on a system is too great for its ‘~s~trength’. The metaphor here is that violence is like what happens when we break a piece of chalk. Strength and strain, however, especially in social systems, are so interwoven historically that it is very difficult to separate them. The diminution of violence involves two possible strategies, or a mixture of the two; one is the increase in the strength of the system, ~the other is the diminution of the strain. The strength of systems involves habit, culture, taboos, and sanctions, all these things, which enable a system to stand

Increasing strain without breaking down into violence. The strains on the system are largely dynamic in character , such as arms races, mutually stimulated hostility, changes in relative economic position or political power, which are often hard to identify. Conflict of interest are only part of the strain on a system, and not always the most important part. It is very hard for people to know their interests, and misperceptions of interests take place mainly through the dynamic processes, not through the structural ones. It is only perceptions of interest which affect people’s behavior, not the ’real’ interests, whatever these may be, and the gap between perception and reality can be very large and resistant to change. However, what Galitung calls structural violence (which has been defined by one unkind commentator as anything that Galltung doesn’~t like) was originally defined as any unnecessarily low expectation of life, an that assumption that

anybody who dies before the allotted span has been killed, however unintentionally and unknowingly, by somebody else. The concept has been expanded to include all the problems off poverty, destitution, deprivation, and misery. These are enormously real and are a very high priority for research and action, but they belong to systems which are only peripherally related to the structures which, produce violence. This is not to say that the cultures of violence and the cultures of poverty are not sometimes related, though not all poverty cultures are culture of violence, and certainly not all cultures of violence are poverty cultures. But the

dynamics of poverty and the success or failure to rise out of ’it are of a complexity far beyond anything which the metaphor of structural violence can offe r. While the metaphor of structural violence performed a ’service in calling attention to a problem, it may have done a disservice in preventing us from finding the

answer .

Extinction outweighs structural violenceBostrum 12 (Nick, Professor of Philosophy at Oxford, directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and winner of the Gannon Award, Interview with Ross Andersen, correspondent at The Atlantic, 3/6, “We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction”, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/)

Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly

understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century.¶ Despite his concerns about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite. In fact, he is a longtime advocate of transhumanism---the effort to improve the human condition, and even human nature itself, through technological means. In the long run he sees technology as a bridge, a bridge we humans must cross with great care, in order to reach new and better modes of being. In his work, Bostrom uses the tools of philosophy and mathematics, in particular probability theory, to try and determine how we as a species might achieve this safe passage. What follows is my conversation with Bostrom about some of the most interesting and worrying existential risks that humanity might encounter in the decades and centuries to come, and about what we can do to make sure we outlast them.¶ Some have argued that we ought to be directing our resources toward humanity's

existing problems, rather than future existential risks, because many of the latter are highly improbable. You have responded by suggesting that existential risk mitigation may in fact be a dominant moral priority over the alleviation of present suffering . Can you explain why? ¶ Bostrom: Well suppose you have a moral view that counts future people as being worth as much as present people. You might say that fundamentally it doesn't matter whether someone exists at the current time or at some future time, just as many people think that from a fundamental moral point

of view, it doesn't matter where somebody is spatially---somebody isn't automatically worth less because you move them to the moon or to Africa or something. A human life is a human life. If you have that moral point of view that future generations matter in proportion to their population numbers, then you get this very stark implication that existential risk mitigation has a much higher utility than pretty much anything else that you could do. There are so many people that could come into existence in

the future if humanity survives this critical period of time---we might live for billions of years, our descendants might colonize billions of solar systems, and there could be a billion and billions times more people than exist

currently. Therefore, even a very small reduction in the probability of realizing this enormous good will tend to outweigh even immense benefits like eliminating poverty or curing malaria , which would be tremendous und

Nuke war threat is real and o/w structural and invisible violence---their expansion of structural violence to an all-pervasive omnipresence makes preventing war impossibleKen Boulding 78 is professor of economics and director, Center for Research on Conflict Resolution, University of Michigan, “Future Directions in Conflict and Peace Studies,” The

Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Jun., 1978), pp. 342-354

Galtung is very legitimately interested in problems of world poverty and the failure of development of the really poor. He tried to amalga-

mate this interest with the peace research interest in the more narrow sense. Unfortunately, he did this by downgrading the study

of inter- national peace, labeling it "negative peace " (it should really have been labeled "negative war") and then developing the concept of "structural violence," which initially meant all those social structures and histories which produced an expectation of life less than that of the richest and longest-lived societies. He argued by analogy that if people died before the age, say, of 70 from avoidable causes,

that this was a death in "war"' which could only be remedied by something called "positive peace." Unfortunately, the concept of structural

violence was broadened , in the word of one slightly unfriendly critic, to include anything that Galtung did not like. Another factor in this situation was the feeling , certainly in the 1960s and early 1970s, that nuclear deterrence was actually succeeding as deterrence

and that the problem of nuclear war had receded into the background. This it seems to me is a most danger- ous illusion and diverted conflict and peace research for ten years or more away from problems of disarmament and stable peace toward a grand, vague study of world developments , for which most of the peace researchers are not particularly well qualified. To my mind, at least, the quality of the research has suffered severely as a result.' The complex nature of the split within the peace research community is reflected in two international peace research organizations. The official one, the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), tends to be dominated by Europeans somewhat to the political left, is rather, hostile to the United States and to the multinational cor- porations, sympathetic to the New International Economic Order and thinks of itself as being interested in justice rather than in peace. The Peace Science Society (International), which used to be called the Peace Research Society (International), is mainly the creation of Walter Isard of the University of Pennsylvania. It conducts meetings all around the world and represents a more peace-oriented, quantitative, science- based enterprise, without much interest in ideology. COPRED, while officially the North American representative of IPRA, has very little active connection with it and contains within itself the same ideological split which, divides the peace research community in general. It has, however, been able to hold together and at least promote a certain amount of interaction between the two points of view. Again representing the "scientific" rather than the "ideological" point of view, we have SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, very generously (by the usual peace research stand- ards) financed by the Swedish government, which has performed an enormously useful service in the collection and publishing of data on such things as the war industry, technological developments, arma- ments, and the arms trade. The Institute is very largely the creation of Alva Myrdal. In spite of the remarkable work which it has done, how- ever, her last book on disarmament (1976) is almost a cry of despair over the folly and hypocrisy of international policies, the overwhelming power of the military, and the inability of mere information, however good, go change the course of events as we head toward ultimate ca- tastrophe. I do not wholly share her pessimism, but it is hard not to be a little disappointed with the results of this first generation of the peace research movement. Myrdal called attention very dramatically to the appalling danger in which Europe stands, as the major battleground between Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union if war ever should break out. It may perhaps be a subconscious recognition-and psychological denial-of the sword of Damocles hanging over Europe that has made the European peace research movement retreat from the realities of the international system into what I must unkindly describe as fantasies of justice. But the American peace research community, likewise, has retreated into a somewhat niggling scientism, with sophisticated meth- odologies and not very many new ideas. I must confess that when I first became involved with the peace research enterprise 25 years ago I had hopes that it might produce some- thing like the Keynesian revolution in economics, which was the result of some rather simple ideas that had never really been thought out clearly before (though they had been anticipated by Malthus and others), coupled with a substantial improvement in the information system with the development of national income statistics which rein- forced this new theoretical framework. As a result, we have had in a single generation a very massive change in what might be called the "conventional wisdom" of economic policy, and even though this conventional wisdom is not wholly wise, there is a world of difference between Herbert Hoover and his total failure to deal with the Great Depression, simply because of everybody's ignorance, and the moder- ately skillful handling of the depression which followed the

change in oil prices in 1-974, which, compared with the period 1929 to 1932, was little more than a bad cold compared with a galloping pneumonia. In the international system, however, there has been only glacial change in the conventional wisdom. There has been some improvement. Kissinger was an improvement on John Foster Dulles. We have had the beginnings of detente, and at least the possibility on the horizon of stable peace between the United

States and the Soviet Union, indeed in the whole temperate zone-even though the tropics still remain uneasy and beset with arms races, wars, and revolutions which we cannot really afford. Nor can we pretend that peace around the temper- ate zone is stable enough so that we do not have to worry

about it. The qualitative arms race goes on and could easily take us over the cliff . The record of peace research in the last generation, therefore, is one of very partial success. It has created a discipline and that is something of long-run consequence, most certainly for the good. It

has made very little dent on the conventional wisdom of the policy makers anywhere in the world. It has not been able to prevent an arms race, any more, I suppose we might say, than the Keynesian economics has been able to prevent inflation. But whereas inflation is an inconvenience,

the arms race may well be another catastrophe . Where, then, do we go from here? Can we see new horizons for peace and

conflict research to get it out of the doldrums in which it has been now for almost ten years? The challenge is surely great enough. It still remains true that war, the breakdown of Galtung's "negative peace," remains the greatest clear and present danger to the human race , a danger to human survival far greater than poverty , or injustice, or oppression , desirable and necessary as it is to eliminate these things. Up to the present generation, war has been a cost and an inconven- ience to the human race, but it has rarely been fatal to the process of evolutionary development as a whole. It has probably not absorbed more than 5% of human time, effort, and resources. Even in the twenti- eth century, with its two world wars and innumerable smaller ones, it has probably not acounted for more than 5% of deaths, though of course a larger

proportion of premature deaths. Now, however, ad- vancing technology is creating a situation where in the first place we are

developing a single world system that does not have the redundancy of the many isolated systems of the past and in which therefore if any- thing goes wrong everything goes wrong . The Mayan civilization could collapse in 900 A.D., and collapse almost irretrievably without Europe or China even being aware of the fact. When we had a number of iso- lated systems, the catastrophe in one was ultimately recoverable by migration from the surviving systems. The one-world system, therefore, which science, transportation, and communication are rapidly giving us, is inherently more precarious than the many-world system of the past. It is all the more important, therefore, to make it internally robust and capable only of recoverable catastrophes. The necessity for stable peace, therefore, increases with every improvement in technology, either of war or of peace.

Circumention DA**note – this card is great vs. the USFG version but shouldn’t be read vs. the non-USFG version (you’d just be reading a DA to the T version of the aff, not to the aff itself)

State-centric curtailment will inevitably fail—circumvention, increase in suppression, and extension of powerSchriefer, 10—advocacy director at Freedom House and contributor to New York Times (Paula, 11/9/10, "The Wrong Way to Combat 'Islamophobia'", New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/opinion/10iht-edschriefer.html?_r=0&module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=Opinion&action=keypress&region=FixedLeft&pgtype=article)//twemchen

This week, member states of the United Nations will vote on what has become an annual resolution, “On Combating Defamation of Religions,” put forward by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a group of 57 states with large Islamic populations. The resolution condemns what it calls “defamation of religions” — a vague notion that can perhaps best be described as a form of expression that offends another’s religious

sensibilities — and urges countries to enact laws that prohibit such forms of expression. The resolutions are part of a larger and dangerous

campaign to create a global blasphemy law to combat what Muslim leaders refer to as “Islamophobia.” Such a campaign is deeply flawed from a human rights perspective , both in its equation of religious discrimination (a legitimate human rights violation) with the vague concept of defamation, as well as in the proposed remedy of imposing legal limits on freedom of expression. A recent Freedom House report looking at blasphemy laws in seven countries documents the negative impact of such laws on a range of fundamental human rights, while noting how

such laws actually contribute to greater interfaith strife and conflict. Because no one can agree on what constitutes blasphemy, laws that attempt to ban it are themselves vague , highly prone to arbitrary enforcement and are used to stifle everything from political opposition to religious inquiry. Particularly when applied in countries with weak democratic safeguards — e.g., strong executives, subservient judiciaries, corrupt law enforcement — blasphemy laws do nothing to achieve their supposed goals of promoting religious tolerance and harmony and instead are disproportionally used to suppress the freedom of religious minorities or members of the majority religion that hold views considered unorthodox. In Pakistan, for example, Christians and Ahmadiyya (Muslims who do not believe Muhammad was the final prophet) make up only 2 percent of the population, but have been the target of nearly half of the more than 900 prosecutions for blasphemy in the past two decades. The remaining prosecutions have been made against Muslims themselves, often simply as an easy way to settle personal scores that have nothing to do with religion. Mere accusations of blasphemy have led to mob violence in which people have been maimed or killed and whole communities devastated. The governments of countries that already have such problematic laws on the books are precisely those countries leading the charge to create an international blasphemy law through the United Nations. The motivations of states like Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — countries with appalling records on religious freedom and broader human rights — are unquestionably hypocritical and have more to do with their desire to score points with unhappy domestic populations and religious extremists than the desire to foster religious tolerance. Support for blasphemy laws is high among the general public in the Islamic world. Even the staunchest advocates of human rights in the Middle East, individuals who are openly critical of their corrupt and authoritarian leaders, balk at the idea that the publication of the Danish cartoons or the burning of a Koran should be protected forms of freedom of expression. In a part of the world where one’s religion is as key to one’s identity as nationality and race, most people simply view such forms of expression as a bigoted attack on their very existence. Such views are bolstered by the need to better address the real issues of discrimination and violence

against individuals because of their religious beliefs, even in established democracies. It is a fact that political parties espousing xenophobic and anti-Islamic views in Europe have gained in both popularity and representation, and that legal policies have been enacted that most human rights organizations rightly see as restricting the fundamental rights of Muslims to practice their religious beliefs. It is also a fact that many of the same people who defended the Danish cartoons as an important form of free expression somehow feel perfectly justified in criticizing the plans to build an Islamic Center near the site of the World

Trade Center because it offends them. Yet hypocrisy in Europe and the United States does not justify attempts to bring governmental oversight into what constitutes offensive expression. Even with the best intentions ,

which are often lacking, governments should never be in the business of policing speech . The tools of defeating

intolerance, including religious intolerance, start with a legislative environment that protects people’s fundamental political rights and civil liberties, including freedom of expression. Blasphemy laws don’t work in any context and U.N. member states should reject them unconditionally.

T/FW

—Note—The T version of the aff and the advantage counterplan are more or less the same. It says the best way to address islamophobia is to tackle the material that is distributed to train law enforcement agents.

The aff has to execute a fine line between K-ing the USFG as a solution on framework when it answers the T version of the aff and reading a permutation to the K. Permutations obviously don’t guarantee agreement, but it’s difficult to say the aff is mutually incompatible with an approach (USFG action) on framework and that it is mutually compatible with the same approach if it is read as a CP.

The neg argument is essentially “you can’t have your cake and eat it, too – you either get the perm and there’s no DA to the topical version of the aff or you don’t get the perm and we get to test the desirability of the topical version of the aff by reading it as a CP.”

Too often, the T version of the aff is a central but underdiscussed portion of the debate. It is thrown out by the neg as a brief cursory vision, but its substance usually goes unexamined and the Neg misses out on the ability to get extra leverage. If you prove the CP solves the aff then it also likely disproves many broad critiques of the USFG they make on Framework.

That being said, critiques of the USFG and framework will also work against the CP, but the aff would’ve read those things anyways. The T version only solves your T offense – reading it as a CP solves both that and some of the aff’s external offense.

1nc CP/T Version

The United States federal government should:

Audit all federal law enforcement and intelligence gathering training and educational materials

Implement a mandatory retraining program for all federal, state and local law enforcement officials

Pursue disciplinary action against those agents and officials engaging in discriminatory conduct and responsible for these training materials

Require federal agencies that provide law enforcement funding to state and local governments to condition such funding on carrying out the above.

We should get the option to read additional solvency evidence in the block to respond to the 2ac’s position on the USFG – we should also get conditionality and new block arguments because we couldn’t plan central parts of our neg strat without hearing the 2ac to topicality

2nc CP/T VersionThe CP is a topical version that solves the aff and disproves their Ks of framework – it’s student dissent so it solves their offense but it utilizes the USFG, which their Ks of framework prove they can’t access or permute – if you allow them to read Ks of framework there needs to be a reciprocal move to allow negative CPs

Your 1AC solvency author agrees Kundnani, 14—professor at New York University (Arun, 3/28/14, "No NSA reform can fix the American Islamophobic surveillance complex", The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/28/nsa-reform-american-islamophobic-surveillance-complex)//twemchen

Snowden has rightly drawn our attention to the power of what intelligence agencies call "signals intelligence" – the surveillance of our digital communications – but equally important is "human intelligence", the result of informants and undercover agents operating within

communities. Underpinning all the surveillance of Muslim Americans is an assumption that Islamic ideology is linked to terrorism. Yet, over the last 20 years, far more people have been killed in acts of violence by right-wing extremists than by

Muslim American citizens or permanent residents. The huge numbers being spied upon are not would-be terrorists but law-abiding people, some of whom have "radical" political opinions that still ought to be protected by the First Amendment to the

constitution. Just the same, there are plenty of other minority Americans who are not would-be "home-grown" terrorists – but they still live in fear that they might be mistaken as one. So let's reform the NSA and its countless collections . But let's not forget the FBI 's reported 10,000 intelligence analysts working on counter-

terrorism and the 15,000 paid informants helping them do it. Let's not forget the New York Police Department 's intelligence and counter-terrorism division with its 1,000 officers, $100m budget and vast program of surveillance. Let's not forget the especially subtle psychological terror of being Muslim in America, where, sure, maybe your phone calls won't be stored for much longer, but there's a multitude of other ways you're always being watched.

The topical version is more effective – making specific demands on government is the only way to reverse institutional discrimination and Islamophobic government practicesJudicial Watch, 14—“Muslim Activists Demand Overhaul of All U.S. Law Enforcement Training,” http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2014/08/muslim-activists-demand-overhaul-u-s-law-enforcement-training/ --BR

Islamic activists that strong-armed the FBI to purge anti-terrorism training material considered “offensive” to Muslims have made their next wave of demands , which include an overhaul in the way all law enforcement officers are trained in the United States. The coalition of influential and politically-connected Muslim rights groups is demanding that the Obama administration implement a mandatory retraining program for all federal, state and local law enforcement officials who may have been subjected to materials they deem “biased and discriminatory” against Muslims. There must also be an audit of all federal law enforcement and intelligence gathering training and educational materials to identify and remove information that could exhibit bias against any race, ethnicity, religion or national origin, the groups demand. Additionally, the administration must pursue disciplinary action against agents and officials who engage in discriminatory conduct as well as those responsible for the anti-

Muslim training materials. Finally , the coalition insists that all federal funding to local and state law enforcement agencies be withheld unless they ban all training materials considered to be biased against race, ethnicity, religion or national origin . In short, these empowered Muslim activists want to dictate how our nation’s law enforcement agencies operate at every level. The outrageous demands were made this month in a letter to Lisa O. Monaco, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. Among the signatories is the terrorist front organization Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has repeatedly proven that it wields tremendous power in the Obama administration. Founded in 1994 by three Middle Eastern extremists, CAIR got the FBI to purge anti-terrorism material determined to be offensive to Muslims. Judicial Watch uncovered that scandal last summer and obtained hundreds of pages of FBI documents with details of the arrangement. JW also published a special in-depth report on the subject in December. CAIR also got several police departments in President Obama’s home state of Illinois to cancel essential counterterrorism courses over accusations that the instructor was anti-Muslim. The course was called “Islamic Awareness as a Counter-Terrorist Strategy” and departments in Lombard, Elmhurst and Highland Park caved into CAIR’s demands. The group responded with a statement commending officials for their “swift action in addressing the Muslim community’s concerns.” CAIR has wielded its power in a number of other cases during the Obama presidency, including blocking an FBI probe involving the radicalization of young Somali men in the U.S. and pressuring the government to file discrimination lawsuits against employers who don’t accommodate Muslims in the workplace. Other signatories include the powerful open borders group Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), Muslim Advocates, the Sikh Coalition, Women in Islam Inc., the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), to name a few. The group’s claim that recent administration directives to promote multicultural and diversity sensitivity training in law enforcement aren’t enough because they don’t specifically address anti-Muslim materials. “Without executive branch actions , including those we recommend below, trainings that perpetuate gross stereotypes and false information about Islam and Muslims will continue to proliferate at the state and local level ,” the letter says. It continues: “The use of anti-Muslim trainers and materials is not only highly offensive, disparaging the faith of millions of Americans, but leads to biased policing that targets individuals and communities based on religion, not evidence of wrongdoing.” This will foster fear and suspicion of Muslims and will lead to an increase in discrimination, bullying, harassment and anti-Muslim violence, the letter asserts.

2nr CP/T VersionThe topical version solves – only making demands on the government can reverse the institutionalized discriminatory surveillance practices the 1ac criticizes – even if the plan challenges the USFG, it won’t halt the distribution of islamophobic scholarship and material that guides the decisions that federal agents make.

We can rein in the NSA and the FBI – first is the mechanism – the CP audits all islamophobic training and educational materials and implements mandatory re-training. It also fires and arrests the people who created it and withholds all federal funding until local and state law enforcement agencies comply

Second is the process – our evidence cites several empirical examples of Muslim-American groups creating material political change and our CP represents the consensus of Muslim scholarship and activism

A2 Assimilation Bad State integration of Muslim groups is effective- empirics from around the world proveRascoff 12 (Samuel J. Rascoff. Professor of Law at NYU. “Establishing Official Islam? The Law and Strategy of Counter-Radicalization.” 2012. http://www.stanfordlawrevie w.org/print/article/establishing-official-islam)//EMerz

In large measure, the politics of Islam on the Continent have been the politics of immigration and postcolonial displacement. Continental Europe’s engagement with Islam, therefore, has largely focused for over a generation on issues of identity politics and social integration.104 Whether the topic has been the regulation of Islamic dress in France or Islamic architecture in Switzerland, government’s role has largely been to establish the contours of a religious identity reconcilable with thick conceptions of membership in national and European communities. More specifically, France and Germany have sought to “domesticate” Islam such that it can serve as an antidote to two powerful undercurrents: the pull of the transnational Ummah on the one hand and consulate-based “Em- bassy Islam” on the other.108 To achieve these goals, the state has “institutionaliz[ed] representative Islamic bodies . . . empower[ed] designated Muslim inter- locutors, and . . . facilitat[ed] the construction and maintenance of Islamic spaces.”109 For example, in 2002, France’s then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy established the French Council for the Muslim Religion to create an official institutional voice for French Muslims, and simultaneously to diminish the extent of foreign involvement in the internal politics of French Islam.110 In Germany, officials appointed a moderate Muslim academic to train instructors of Islam within the public schools, which has raised criticisms from certain German Muslim organizations.

A2 But Surveillance ThoSurveillance proves why political mobilization and participation is important – tons of Muslim and Arab communities prove this is the best method O’Connor and Jahan 14 (Alexander J. O’Connor and Farhana Jahan. “Under Surveillance and Overwrought: American Muslims’ Emotional and Behavioral Responses to Government Surveillance.” 2014. Vol. 8 Issue 1. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jmmh/10381607.0008.106?view=text;rgn=main) //EMerz

It is important to note that while reports of anger were unrelated to reports of experience with surveillance, reports of anger were quite high.[1] While not the focus of this research, anger likely triggers unique behavioral consequences. For instance, work by political scientists suggests that the prospect of government surveillance leads to political mobilization and participation, particularly within the American Muslim and Arab communities (Ayers & Hofstetter, 2008; Cho, Gimpel, & Wo, 2006). Best and Krueger (2011), who examined anger and anxiety in response to the presence and acknowledgement of government surveillance in a broad sample of Americans, found that anger, not anxiety, predicted political participation. Thus, anger, its regulation, and its behavioral correlates likely play a unique role in experiences with discrimination. But the persistent uncertainty associated with experiences of government surveillance may have an unique effect on anxiety, not anger.

A2 Discourse First Political Leaders should use their power to fight Islamophobia- only in this way can we reshape our discourseGadzo 15. (Mersiha Gadzo. “For Islamophobia to stop, it needs to start from the top.” February 27, 2015. http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/islamophobia-stop-it-needs-start-top-875950253#sthash.OGANFut8.dpuf)//EMerz

To fight jihadism, Islamophobia needs to be curbed. World leaders such as Barack Obama, Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel know this. They have all spoken publicly of the importance of unity and equality, denouncing the scapegoating of Muslims. After the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, Merkel told the Bundestag that Germany’s Muslims are a vital part of society. “There must be no ostracism of Muslims, no sweeping suspicions. As chancellor, I will come to the defence of Muslims in this country against that,” she said. But here in Canada, Harper remained silent when mosques were vandalised across Canada in a spike of anti-Muslim hate crimes after the death of the two Canadian soldiers. An imam in Toronto recently called for Ottawa to stop linking Islam and terrorism, referring to Harper’s speech where he suggested mosques could serve as spaces for radicalisation. In the same speech he used the word “jihad” 15 times. These actions divide society, creates a “us” vs “them” ideology, a rhetoric shared by George Bush, Harper and the Islamic State. Politicians and the media have the power to influence public opinion; they should choose their words carefully. For Islamophobia to stop, it needs to start from the top. Harper has cried wolf in many cases in the past along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. For years they alarmed the public about how Iran is the biggest threat to world peace and that it’s developing nuclear weapons to destroy Israel. But the truth always surfaces in the end, and this week leaked cables show that Israel’s secret service Mossad knew that Iran wasn’t making a nuclear weapon. Harper and Netanyahu have been raising false alarms based on zero evidence.

A2 Don’t Need Blueprints

Critical terror studies isolate elites in their movement while failing to put forth legitimate solutionsHussain 13 (Salman Adil Hussain. “Cover Story: Review of Deepa Kumar's Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire.” July 14,, 2013. http://www.dawn.com/news/1024393) //EMerz

It is this imperial racism and the dehumanising Islamophobic rhetoric of the so-called ‘war on terror’ that Kumar brings into focus in this most valuable primer. “Drawing on my academic training as a cultural theorist,” Kumar writes, “I situate the rhetoric of Islamophobia within the broader political, historical, legal, and social context from which it emerges to show that anti-Muslim racism has been primarily a tool of the elite in various societies.” She demonstrates in elegant, accessible prose that Islamophobia is neither timeless nor expressed and acted upon in any uniform way. It is not an eternal, unchangeable Western hatred of Islam and Muslims, but is actively whipped up when it is politically expedient to do so. This point is crucial. To be able to see Islamophobia’s making (and remaking) holds the key to its unmaking. In Kumar’s telling, it is the age of modern European colonialism and its “systematic use of scholarly knowledge to serve the needs of empire” — what can be described as Orientalism — that Islamophobia acquires its full political potency from. The worldview produced by these Orientalist scholars was one, to quote Kumar, “in which the ‘West’ is seen as dynamic, complex, and ever-changing society which cannot be reduced to its key religion or any other single factor, while the ‘Orient’ or the ‘world of Islam’ is presented as unchanging, barbaric, misogynistic, uncivilised, and despotic.” When by the middle of the 20th century, the US “took over the mantle of colonial overlord of the ‘Muslim world,’” it too began to systematically study the Middle East as the European empires had done. This American scholarship reproduced the Orientalist dualism in the form of the “modernisation theory,” a highly influential theory till the 1970s. Kumar notes that this theory categorised societies along the traditional-modern binary, roughly mapping on to the old East/West divide: “Traditional societies were agricultural and rural, slow to change, and politically authoritarian. Modern societies, on the other hand, were seen as industrial, quick to change, and politically democratic and egalitarian.” The so-called traditional societies could not change from within; they had to be changed from without by Western intervention. America’s mission, conceived through such a dichotomous understanding of the world, is that of ‘benevolent supremacy’: “the notion that an American-dominated world would ensure liberty and democracy for all through the mechanisms of free-market capitalism.” According to Kumar, such views are widely held. Even those that joined the massive anti-war liberal-left coalition against the Iraq invasion bought into the official line that the American occupation is necessary for democracy to bloom in Iraq. Kumar, an active member of the anti-war movement, writes that she “found almost unanimous agreement in the [antiwar] coalition that this was indeed the right thing to do.” From academic justifications of imperialism, Kumar moves to an analysis of the American foreign policy thought, and finds that there is a consensus between the neoconservatives and “the realist/liberal camp” when it comes to “the right of the United States to assert its power around the world,” and on American exceptionalism — the idea that America is unique among nations because of its liberal values. Kumar charts these two trajectories through time and notes that while “[a]fter Vietnam, Cold War liberals backed away from open confrontation and intervention,” preferring, for instance in the Clinton era, coalition building and politically expedient, selective “humanitarian” interventionism, (if possible)

with the endorsement of the United Nations, the neoconservatives remained committed to militarism. The difference, thus, is a matter of frankness about the use of violent means to the same imperial ends. The collapse of the Soviet Union, however, left America with no global foe against which the neocon militarist fantasies could be enacted. To address this void, even before 9/11, neocons like Daniel Pipes identified Islam as the new threat to the West just as communism had been during the Cold War. But the installation of the Islamic enemy as the supreme villain to the West had to wait till 9/11. Kumar notes that “capitalising on this opportunity […] also meant orchestrating an elaborate public relations campaign designed to elicit public support and stifle criticism. Enter the War on Terror and the language of Islamophobia.” Obama has hammered again and again that the US is not at war with Islam. It is not my purpose to argue that it is, but to point out how such statements serve to obfuscate the Islamophobia of American foreign and domestic policies. Liberal Islamophobia shuns the language of ‘clash of civilisation’ that one routinely came across in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Instead, it prefers the nicer-sounding ‘clash within’ thesis that holds that there is a war going on “inside Islam” between moderate Muslims (‘our friends’) and the extremist ones (‘our enemy’). Caught in the middle of a fight not of its own making, the United States, always both the innocent bystander and the reluctant, self-designated policeman of the world, needs to strengthen ‘friend Muslims’ through diplomacy, market initiatives, and of course, by visiting violence on the ‘enemy Muslims’. Friend Muslims know that what’s good for America is good for the world. Enemy Muslims, on the other hands, are united by a common ideology that fuels terrorism, which, in Obama’s words, is “a belief by some extremists that Islam is in conflict with the United States and the West.” Terrorism experts and various US state officials term this the ‘Jihadi narrative’: a stringing together of real or fictitious incidents of American aggression as evidence of America’s/West’s war on Islam. Ill- informed, irrational Muslims, so prone to conspiracy theories, get “brainwashed” and radicalised by this fabricated litany of anti-Muslim American violence, the theory goes. Radicalisation is conceived as a conveyor belt to suicide bombing and the person on this path, to quote from the aforementioned Obama speech, “is drifting towards violence.” Even if he has not committed any violence, it is deemed destined that he will — unless he is killed or captured. This counterterrorist narrative about the ‘Jihadi narrative’ distracts liberals from developing a vigorous critique of the ‘war on terror’ as they recover from their fleeting feelings of shame about the frequent “flying while Muslim” incidents with musings about how ‘those radical Muslims’ must love such stories about America falling short of its ideals. Worse yet, this narrative becomes a way to silence any charges of Islamophobia and racism levelled at the United States’ global wars and Muslim critiques of American violence are dismissed with prejudice as ‘Osama-talk’. This last charged was also hurled at me by a Pakistani liberal, who took anti-imperialist critiques of the US to be necessarily right-wing talking points stemming from knee-jerk “anti-Americanism.” Having thus completely abandoned anti-imperialism as a relevant, progressive cause, Pakistani liberals then self-righteously wonder why so many of Pakistan’s middle-class (sub)urban youth grow fond of jingoist, military-idolising talking heads like Zaid Hamid who posit a besieged Islam as a veritable damsel in distress and Pakistan military with its phallic armaments as the guardian of its honour. Much of the imperial rhetoric holds Islamism to be violent extremism — an Islamic problem, with, to quote the aforementioned Obama speech, “deep rooted problems like poverty and sectarian hatred” feeding it. In this narrative, these enabling factors have nothing to do with America, and are presumably inherent to Muslim society. In two stirring chapters, Kumar historicises the emergence of what is also referred to as political Islam. She reminds readers of the history of America’s arming and financing — as a bulwark against communism — what Obama referred to as “extremism, from North Africa to South Asia.” Kumar

elucidates the “overarching conditions that enable Islamists to vie for hegemony” in the late 20th century, namely: the American role in the birth and propagation of violent global Jihad; the American-backed violence on secular nationalist political forces; the failure of the Left to step into the void created by the retreat of secular nationalist forces; neoliberalism’s relentless exacerbation of economic crises across the world that paved the way for the rise of right-wing religio-political movements across religions. Kumar argues that developing a robust understanding of political Islam requires that it not be considered a unified phenomenon. Instead, each Islamist movement must be placed in its local context. However, she also says that the role local conditions play is beyond the purview of her exploration. If that is the case , Kumar’s claim to be looking at “the phenomenon of political Islam on its own terms” falls short, for however necessary the global conditions may be, they do not fully explain why this particular ideology (and not some other) came to be the political force that it is today. In other words, the question to ponder is: why did ordinary people partake in Islamism(s), and what about it/them captured their imagination and political energies? A similar issue lies in conceptualising Islamophobia as a tool of the political elites, mobilised in order to serve their interests. Again, this does not tell us much about what compels ordinary citizens to follow the lead of the political classes/elites. In other words, when it comes to Islamophobia, what brings the interests of both the elites and the masses in consonance? Drawing a sharp dichotomy between the interests of the elites and those of the common people has the unfortunate effect of taking away the latter’s agency, rendering them into mindless cattle which can be herded into lynch mobs. It is a politically and intellectually debilitating position to take. On the one hand, Kumar believes that “it is from the ranks of ordinary people that activists emerge to challenge racism in all its forms. It is here that the hope for fighting and ending Islamophobia lies.” But when it comes to explaining why ordinary people espouse Islamophobic ideas, she states that this is because “those who rule a society tend to set the terms of discussion,” even though “ordinary people can and do resist dominant ideas.” History teaches us that the elite are not always successful in securing consent, despite the mighty ideological apparatus. But the question still remains: how do (some) elite ideas, in this case imperial Islamophobia, become dominant at a given moment in time? Knowing how ‘the masses’ are also pivotal to the maintenance of violent ideologies and systems can help one see the mundane, everyday workings of power, and ordinary people’s complicity in the very systems of dominance that oppress them. That may constitute a valuable lesson for us ordinary people in how to resist, or at least how not to enlist in, predatory social systems

A2 Ethics First Challenging the state is necessary to restore our responsibility to the otherCampbell 99 (David Campbell, professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle, 1999, Moral Spaces, p. 40-41.)//EMerz

Even though Levinas's limited reservations about the state are here restricted to the nature of (domestic) political order, the idea that "the state may have to be challenged in the name of our ethical responsibility to the other " at least allows for the possibility of extending political action in terms of the ethical relation beyond the bounds suggested by Levinas's previous reflections on the third party and the state. There is no doubt, however, that to fulfill the promise of Levinas's ethics with respect to international politics, this possibility for challenge has to be carried a good deal further. Moreover, I would argue, this possibility for challenge has to be pursued in order to maintain fidelity with Levinas's conviction that neither politics nor warfare can obliterate the relationship of the self to the other as a relation of responsibility. Indeed, this endeavor might be thought of in terms of making Levinas's thought more "Levinasian," for pursuing this possibility of challenge flows from the recognition that “injustice—not to mention racism, nationalism, and imperialism—begins when one loses sight of the transcendence of the Other and forgets that the State, with its institutions, is informed by the proximity of my relation to the other.

A2 Law Bad The U.S. government uniquely has the capacity to fight Islamophobia- the legal system is ridden with anti-Muslim laws that only the state can fixCAIR 13 (Council on American-Islam Relations. “Legislating Fear.” August 20, 2013. Page 133-136. http://www.cair.com/images/islamophobia/Legislating-Fear.pdf)//EMerz

Groups in the inner core should ostracized from mainstream public discourse in a manner similar to white supremacist, anti-Semitic or other groups, such as the Westboro Baptist church. Free speech is essential in an open society. People of conscience must be willing to defend speech that repulses their humanity. However, we at CAIR believe that bigoted speech should be relegated to where it belongs- the fringes of society and out of serious policy discussion. Inner core groups should not be offered legitimizing platforms by media outlets or political groups. Challenge the culture of politically exploiting hate against Muslims, reject anti-Muslim laws Legislators must reject the introduction of anti-Muslim, anti-Sharia, and anti-foreign law legislation that seeks to marginalize American Muslims and keep them from having the same rights and access to the courts as Americans of other faiths. Rep. Peter King’s five anti-Muslim hearings generated no appreciable response from Republican leadership. The response to Rep. Michele Bachmann’s allegations of Muslim Brotherhood infiltration was encouraging. It was both bi-partisan and strong. When contenders for our nation’s highest office call for loyalty oaths or smear an entire religious minority as a threat then they should face significant opposition. Protect the sanctity of places of worship America as a place that protects religious minorities is an ideal ingrained in our national character since the Pilgrims arrival. When a place of worship is damaged or vandalized the entire community, religious leaders of all faiths, elected officials and private citizens should rally to reject bias. Similarly, when routine zoning or land use issues are transformed into forums of hate speech or legal challenges as to the very nature of religion then strong voices for pluralism need to be present. CAIR’s recently released “Best Practices for Mosque and Community Safety” brochure is an ideal starting place for facility leaders interested in improving the facility of their site. Contact info@cair.com using the subject line “mosque safety” for more information. Support of the End Racial Profiling Act and reform of DOJ racial profiling guidelines CAIR requests that Congress enact the End Racial Profiling Act and revise the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division’s Guidance Regarding the Use of Race by Federal Law Enforcement Agencies. The U.S. Constitution requires that federal and state law enforcement agencies respect the rights and freedoms of “all persons,” regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, or national origin. American citizens respect their law enforcement agencies and look to them to enshrine the rights that the Constitution affords in their institutions, policies and practices. Should our nation’s law enforcement agencies overlook or disregard the Constitution by engaging in acts of discriminatory profiling, our citizens would be sent a message that engaging in profiling based on race, nationality, religion, etc., is acceptable and worth emulating. CAIR also believes that racial and religious profiling is not effective law enforcement and narrowly focuses the nation’s law enforcement resources away from following actual leads and preventing illegal and violent acts. Profiling violates the basic constitutional protections of the First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. Profiling also hinders counterterrorism efforts against antigovernment extremists. For example, Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City Bombing, 1995), James Von Brunn (Holocaust Museum Shooting, Washington, D.C. 2009) John Bedell (Pentagon Shooting, Washington, D.C. 2010), Joseph Stack (IRS Building Suicide Bombing, Austin, TX 2010) and Floyd Corking (Family Research Council Shooting, Washington D.C. 2012)

would not have been identified by racial or religious profiling. Drop or modify the term Islamist Many Muslims who wish to serve the public good are influenced by the principles of their faith. Islam teaches Muslims to work for the welfare of humanity and to be honest and just. If this inspiration came from the Bible, such a person might well be called a Good Samaritan. But when the source is the Quran, the person is an "Islamist." Unfortunately, the term "Islamist" has become shorthand for "Muslims we don't like." It is currently used in an almost exclusively pejorative context and is often coupled with the term "extremist," giving it an even more negative slant. There are few, if any, positive references to "Islamist" in news articles. background to make him or her a subject matter expert. Congress and other Federal entities that oversee training grants should ensure that federal grants to state law enforcement counterterrorism training programs do not go to anti-Muslim trainings or trainers. As noted by the author’s of How We Train Our Cops to fear Islam, “State accreditation should be made mandatory for counterterrorism training courses—it often isn’t—and the accreditation process itself must also be toughened. There should be subject-matter experts who evaluate courses, and they should sit in on classroom sessions anonymously. If such a system of state-based oversight worked properly, then bad trainers would have their state accreditation revoked, and they would no longer be allowed to teach in the state. If states agreed to share lists of bad trainers, then the trainer would effectively be banned nationwide. There are also no -- nor should there be -- references to "Christianists," "Judaists" or "Hinduists" for those who would similarly seek governments "in accord with the laws" of their respective faiths. No journalist would think of referring to the "Judaist government of Israel," the "Christianist leader Rick Santorum" or "Hinduist Indian politician Narendra Modi," while use of "Islamist" has become ubiquitous. It might be an interesting exercise to hold a contest, the winner of which would be the first to find a positive mainstream media reference to "Islamist." The frequent linkage of the term "Islamist" to violence and denial of religious and human rights is also strongly promoted by Islamophobic groups and individuals who seek to launch rhetorical attacks on Islam and Muslims, without the public censure that would normally accompany such bigoted attacks on any other faith. Islam-bashers routinely use the term to disingenuously claim they only hate "political" Islam, not the faith itself. Yet they fail to explain how a practicing Muslim can be active in the political arena without attracting the label "Islamist." By not dropping or modifying use of the term, the media are making a political and religious value judgment each time it is used. Remove anti-Muslim, discriminatory trainers and materials in U.S. military and law enforcement at all levels Where it has not already happened, Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies should review their counter terrorism materials and remove information that is biased or inaccurate. All should adhere to the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal interagency guidelines on CVE curriculum standards, Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Training: Guidance and Best Practices. Any trainer should have either the educational or operational background to make him or her a subject matter expert. Congress and other Federal entities that oversee training grants should ensure that federal grants to state law enforcement counterterrorism training programs do not go to anti-Muslim trainings or trainers. As noted by the author’s of How We Train Our Cops to fear Islam, “State accreditation should be made mandatory for counterterrorism training courses—it often isn’t—and the accreditation process itself must also be toughened. There should be subject-matter experts who evaluate courses, and they should sit in on classroom sessions anonymously. If such a system of state-based oversight worked properly, then bad trainers would have their state accreditation revoked, and they would no longer be allowed to teach in the state. If states agreed to share lists of bad trainers, then the trainer would effectively be banned nationwide.

The legal framework to repeal Islamophobic laws already exists- it’s just a matter of striking down those lawsCAIR 13 (Council on American-Islam Relations. “Legislating Fear.” August 20, 2013. Page 61-62. http://www.cair.com/images/islamophobia/Legislating-Fear.pdf)//EMerz

No national Muslim organization is calling for the implementation of foreign law in the United States. Many support the idea that individuals can make faith-based agreements that are in accordance with U.S. law which can subsequently be enforced by U.S. courts. A primary example of this is the Islamic mortgage industry. Corporations offer loans that are compliant with both Islamic rules against lending money with interest and with American law. These contracts can, if necessary, be enforced in a U.S. court of law. In 2011, the American Bar Association (ABA) passed a resolution opposing ALAC-type legislation noting that it is “duplicative of safeguards that are already enshrined in federal and state law,” and saying, “Initiatives that target an entire religion or stigmatize an entire religious community, such as those explicitly aimed at ‘Sharia law,’ are inconsistent with some of the core principles and ideals of American jurisprudence.” The ABA also stated the following: “Language in these Bills and Amendments dealing with ‘international law’ or ‘foreign and customary law’ is likely to have an unanticipated and widespread negative impact on business, adversely affecting commercial dealings and economic development in the states in which such a law is passed and in U.S. foreign commerce generally.” “Many of the Bills and Amendments would infringe federal constitutional rights, including the free exercise of religion and the freedom of contract, or would conflict with the Supremacy Clause and other clauses of the Constitution.” Regarding the notion of Islamic rules supplanting American law, the American Civil Liberties Union reached the following conclusion in a report released in May 2011: A new report by the ACLU, Nothing to Fear: Debunking the Mythical "Sharia Threat" to Our Judicial System, examines, in detail, the cases repeatedly cited by anti-Muslim groups as evidence of the alleged "Sharia threat" to our judicial system. The report concludes that these cases do not stand for the principles that anti-Muslim groups claim. Rather, these court cases deal with routine matters, such as religious freedom claims and contractual disputes. Courts treat these lawsuits in the same way that they deal with similar claims brought by people of other faiths. So instead of the harbingers of doom that anti-Muslim groups make them out to be, these cases illustrate that our judicial system is alive and well, and operating as it should. The Anti-Defamation League wrote of the 2012 anti-Islam bill in Florida that there “simply is no documentation of unconstitutional application of foreign law in our judicial system. Florida courts are already prohibited from applying or considering religious law in any way that would constitute government entanglement with religion due to the separation of church and state embodied in the Florida and federal constitutions.” 129 The Florida Bar’s Family Law Section made a similar argument.130 As will be shown momentarily, the legislators who introduced anti-Islam bills also failed to produce evidence of an actual problem they felt would be addressed by such a law.

A2 No Political Agency Muslims do have political agency and saying they don’t overlooks a litany of examples of Muslim involvement in US civic life Senzai 12 (Farid Senzai. “Engaging American Muslims: Political Trends and Attitudes.” 4/3/12. http://www.ispu.org/pdfs/ISPU_Report_Political_Participation .pdf Page 72).//EMerzRecommendations: 1. Provide Resources to Further Mobilize the Community: The empirical evidence suggests that American Muslims are increasingly active and civically engaged citizens. Although their level of political incorporation and mobilization has increased over the past decade, the community as a whole is still not as engaged as it could be. For example, some levels of involvement trail behind those of the general public, including the percentage that is active members of a political party or that contributes to political campaigns. Community organizers need to provide the information and resources needed to help motivate and mobilize the community further. 2. Tap into Active Segments of Community: Nationally, African American Muslims were found to be most active in almost all categories of political participation, compared to immigrant Muslims. In addition, state level data in Michigan showed high political engagement by women and young people. Community organizers and political strategists should tap into these highly active subgroups to lead their communities. 3. Engage with Mosque Communities: Evidence suggests that higher levels of religiosity and mosque attendance lead to higher levels of political participation. This can be seen in mosque participants’ higher voting levels, increased awareness of the issues, writing to their representatives, engaging peacefully in political protest, and other indicators of political activity. Candidates, political leaders, and community organizers looking to reach out Muslim voters should reach out to the mosque leadership and active members. 4. Speak to the Issues that Concern American Muslims: The American Muslim community can be cultivated for either a Republican or a Democratic candidate, particularly in such swing states as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. This report highlights evidence that candidates can build better relations with the community by demonstrating awareness of those issues of most concern to community members.

A2 No Solve Local The T version still solves state and local surveillance – it’s driven by the FBI and federal standards O’Connor and Jahan 14 (Alexander J. O’Connor and Farhana Jahan. “Under Surveillance and Overwrought: American Muslims’ Emotional and Behavioral Responses to Government Surveillance.” 2014. Vol. 8 Issue 1. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jmmh/10381607.0008.106?view=text;rgn=main) //EMerzIn early 2012, it was uncovered that the New York Police Department established an extensive program of surveillance and infiltration of Muslim student organizations in universities across the northeast (Ebadolahi, 2012). That this surveillance occurred both within and outside of New York City—in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, for instance—was early evidence of the extent and support of covert surveillance of American Muslims by United States law enforcement and intelligence

agencies. Similar instances of widespread surveillance conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were later uncovered in other areas of the country (ACLU, 2012). Such reports of governmental surveillance, profiling, and

monitoring—all which we consider in the present study—increased after September 11th, 2001 (Ibish, 2003). The USA PATRIOT Act (2001), signed in the months after 9/11, by reducing restrictions in law enforcement agencies' ability to conduct surveillance on anyone

suspected of involvement in terrorism, provided the legal legitimacy for much of the subsequent surveillance (Council

on American-Islamic Relations, 2004; Ibish, 2003). Revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program suggest that these methods have since expanded (Greenwald & MacAskill, 2013). Such surveillance, however, has targeted many people, Muslims in particular, with no connection to terrorism (Ibish, 2003).

Alongside other forms of post-9/11 discrimination experienced by American Muslims, government surveillance is associated with psychological distress—including depression and subclinical forms of paranoia (Ahmed, Kia-Keating, & Tsai, 2011; Amer & Hovey, 2012; Rippy & Newman, 2006). Little is known, however, about (1) American Muslims’ emotional reaction to being monitored by the government and (2) how they respond to, manage, and regulate these emotions alongside the prospect of continuing or future surveillance. The present work examined these two phenomena.

A2 Political Agency FailsPolitical engagement with Muslim communities is the most effective at protecting the identity group and promoting security domestically Rascoff 12 (Samuel J. Rascoff. Professor of Law at NYU. “Establishing Official Islam? The Law and Strategy of Counter-Radicalization.” 2012. http://www.stanfordlawrevie w.org/print/article/establishing-official-islam)//EMerz

Domestic counter-radicalization efforts have increasingly been predicated on the idea that engagement—outreach to certain Muslim communities in order to make Official Islam a social reality—can play a crucial role in promoting domestic security. Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough re- cently affirmed the Obama Administration’s commitment to engagement with local Muslim communities: [E]quipped with this information, we’ve expanded our engagement with local communities that are being targeted by terrorist recruiters. The departments of Homeland Security and Justice have created new advisory groups, instituted regular outreach sessions, and held dozens of roundtables across the country. It’s all been with the goal of listening to your communities, sharing information on how al Qaeda attempts to recruit and radicalize, and answering the question so many communities have asked us—what can we do to protect our young people?131The precise nature of outreach programs of this sort varies within agencies and from one agency to the next. The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Counterterrorism Center, the Department of Justice, and numerous state and local agencies have each engaged with members of the Muslim community inside the United States for the purpose of counter- radicalization. For example, the officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Center recently participated in a community awareness briefing for Muslim leaders in Hartford, Connecticut, devoted to “Understanding Radicalization and De-Radicalization Strategies.”132 Among the panel discussions was a session devoted to “Seeking a Counter-Reformation in Islam.”133 The U.S. Attorney in Oregon created his own “network of Muslim community leaders” motivated by the desire to “educate Muslim partners and give them resources and support so they can counter radicalization on their own.”134 And Ohio’s counter-radicalization efforts have included the creation of an imam council.135

A2 Privacy Laws BadLegal change can combat profiling – lack of privacy protections is the primary roadblock at government levelMitsilegas 13. (Valsamis Mitsilegas, “The Value of Privacy in an Era of Security: Embedding Constitutional Limits on Preemptive Surveillance” Queen Mary University of London, International Political Sociology [PDI] The intervention by the judiciary in the security-- privacy constitutional struggle ‐ serves to highlight the importance of privacy as a

legal principle capable of effectively addressing the reconfiguration of the relationship between the individual and the state caused by preemptive surveillance. Privacy can be effective in this context in five key ways: in focusing on the impact of surveillance on the individual as a whole, rather than focusing on the protection of specific categories of personal data; in emphasizing the need to protect private life and personal data as fundamental rights, rather than attempting to provide a mere regulatory framework for the use and processing of personal data; in challenging the justification and practices of the collection of personal data by the state and the private sector per se, rather than merely setting limits on the processing, use and transfer of such data ex post, after it has been

collected; in addressing the challenges of profiling individuals resulting from the maximization of the collection, and access to, personal data and the interlinking of databases; and last, but not least, in focusing on the reconfiguration of the

relationship of trust between the citizen and the state which a permanent and generalized surveillance regime entails. Privacy can thus

provide protection not only as a fundamental right in itself, but also by underpinning the exercise of other

fundamental rights and, as such, act as a democratic and rule of law safeguard.

A2 Social Before Law Laws increasing the power of Homeland Security to conduct surveillance on Muslims are at the core of Islamophobic attitudes nationwide CAIR 13 (Council on American-Islam Relations. “Legislating Fear.” August 20, 2013. Page 72-73. http://www.cair.com/images/islamophobia/Legislating-Fear.pdf)//EMerz

Two Department of Homeland Security Reauthorization Acts contained language that singled out American Muslims for additional scrutiny over the threat of violent extremism in the United States. Co-sponsored by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), both bills (S.1546 and H.R.3116) sought to create a new coordinator position within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to direct efforts on “counter[ing] homegrown violent Islamist extremism” with particular focus on the “ideology of Al Qaeda and its affiliated groups” in the United States. In a letter to Senator Lieberman, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano reaffirmed that, “DHS has made it a priority to counter all forms of domestic violent extremism, regardless of ideology,” and that DHS has already established, “the Counterterrorism Advisory Board [led by a counterterrorism coordinator] to better coordinate the Department's … efforts to prevent and protect against foreign and homegrown terrorist attacks.” Section 213 of the Department of Homeland Security Reauthorization Act 2011 (S. 1546) stated, “The Secretary [of Homeland Security] shall designate an official of the Department [of Homeland Security] to coordinate efforts to counter violent extremism in the United States, particularly the ideology that gives rise to Islamist terrorism. …” A DHS position focused on “Islamist extremism” plays well in the current political fear-of-Islam environment. However, enacting such a position would send a clear message that the U.S. government views American Muslims collectively as a threat. Such a position would be short sighted, as terrorism in America can arise from a number of ideologies. It also leaves wide open a door for the United States government to become involved in determining the “correct” or “acceptable” form of Islam.

A2 Structural Oppression The USFG has passed hundreds of anti-Islam legislation that only it can revise- revision will minimize legal racism against MuslimsCAIR 13 (Council on American-Islam Relations. “Legislating Fear.” August 20, 2013. Page 59-60. http://www.cair.com/images/islamophobia/Legislating-Fear.pdf)//EMerz

In 2011 and 2012, an apparent lack of confidence in the U.S. Constitution’s strength led to a number of bills, and in some cases laws, which have at their heart the goal of subjecting Islam to government-sanctioned censure. The Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan component of the Library of Congress that does research for members of Congress, determined that, “Any bill that would specifically ban sharia may be challenged as a disapproval of Islam in violation of the Establishment Clause or as an infringement on the ability of Muslims to freely exercise their beliefs under the Free Exercise Clause.” 126 Similarly, Think Progress reported, “As the Supreme Court explained in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. Hialeah, ‘the protections of the Free Exercise Clause pertain if the law at issue discriminates against some or all religious beliefs or regulates or prohibits conduct because it is undertaken for religious reasons.’” 127 These legal protections are part of what makes America vibrant. Opposing Islamophobic efforts to undermine them ensures that American democracy continues to work for everyone. American Laws for American Courts and Its Derivatives In 2011 and 2012, 78 bills or amendments designed to vilify Islamic religious practices were introduced in the legislatures of 29 states and the U.S. Congress. Sixty-two of these bills contained language that was extracted from Islamophobe David Yerushalmi’s American Laws for American Courts (ALAC) model legislation.v Party of bills’ original sponsor(s): 73 bills were introduced by Republicans, 1 bill was introduced by a Democrat (Alabama), 3 were bi-partisan (Kansas, South Carolina, South Dakota), 1 was introduced by Republicans along with an Independent who caucuses with the Republicans (South Dakota) Number of bills that used language of Islamophobe David Yerushalmi, 62 were based on David Yerushalmi’s American Law for American Courts, 16 were not Fate of Bills Bills were signed into law in Arizona, Kansas, South Dakota and Tennessee in 2011 and 2012. These joined previously passed bills in Oklahoma and Louisiana bringing the total to six states with an anti-Islam law on the books. What Is Sharia? Sharia literally means "path." It is a set of interpretations of the Quran and other Islamic sources; it is dynamic and intended to accommodate the time, place and laws—in America that means the U.S. Constitution—of a particular community.vi Sharia is interpreted differently based on its surroundings. Sharia mandates Muslims to respect the law of the land in which they live. Is Sharia Taking Over? According to the Public Religion Research Institute, as of September 2012, 61 percent of Americans reject the notion that American Muslims are seeking to establish Sharia as the law of the land. The number of Americans who feel that Muslims are working to subvert the Constitution rose from 23 percent in February 2012 to 30 percent in September 2012. 128 No religious code can replace American law. Article VI, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution clearly states, “This Constitution…shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby. …” Additionally, the First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion. …” vi See “Sharia and Diversity: Why Americans are Missing the Point” by Institute for Social Policy Understanding fellow Asifa Quraishi-Landes for a brief but excellent introduction to Sharia. America has an already established tradition of allowing people of faith to make agreements and resolve disputes within the parameters of their religion, as

long as any resulting contract complies with U.S. law. Catholic Canon law and Jewish Halacha are the most frequently cited examples in the context of the debate surrounding Islamic practices.

A2 T Version Doesn’t S** A perm can only benefit the neg – they can’t win DAs to the USFG but we can win DAs to excluding it—a combination of the top-down and bottom-up approach is the most effective way to combating Islamophobia Tutt, 13—Ph.D. in philosophy and Documentary Film Producer, fellow at the Institute of Social Policy (Daniel, "How Should We Combat Islamophobia?," Huffington Post, www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-tutt/how-should-we-combat-islamophobia_b_3149768.html)//twemchen

While the dust has yet to settle on the horrific Boston bombings by the Tsarnaev brothers, Muslims have already felt the impact of their association with Islam. We have witnessed a rise in Islamophobic discourse in the popular media and blogosphere. As an activist who focuses on studying and combatting Islamophobia, I have wondered how we might effectively re-frame the narrative to prevent more Islamophobia. But at the same time, I have also realized that in our rush to write op-ed's and respond via the media, we should take a step back to consider the literature on Islamophobia and what it might teach us at this moment. After reading a diverse set of books and studies by different writers, including anthropologists, political scientists,

sociologists and even activists who specifically address Islamophobia, I have identified two distinctive and quite different approaches to understanding how Islamophobia can be reduced in society. In one model, what I call the integrationist model, Islamophobia is understood as a "general fear of the other" that requires a relationship to repair . The other

model, what I call the critical approach, Islamophobia is understood as a systemic problem , generated by cultural, governmental

and civil discourses, and not as a subjective phenomena in need of a "cure ." Both of these models not only present a different view on how to effectively treat or combat Islamophobia, each model also presents different theories of social change. While there are overlapping points of analysis regarding the causes of Islamophobia in both models, there are significant differences. These differences must not be overlooked because they inform the way in which programs and grassroots responses to Islamophobia occur. In the wake of the Boston bombing, these models can help us to think more carefully about whether the way in which we are combatting Islamophobia is contributing to the sorts of changes we

want to see in the world, or whether they are re-enforcing some of the prejudices we are seeking to ameliorate. The Critical Model The first model, what I call the "critical" approach is articulated by writers such as Deepa Kumar in "Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire," Stephen Sheehi in "Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign

Against Muslims" and in Saba Mahmoud's work, in "Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation." In this model, Islamophobia is not understood as a fear cultural of otherness, but as a political campaign that is tied to American power and

discursive processes that subject Muslims to the power of the state and other interests. In this model, Islamophobia is understood as a symptom of American power and imperial interests , particularly the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 9/11, and the bloated security state that followed from 9/11. Stephen Sheehi sees the origin of Islamophobia in the rise of neoconservative think tanks following the cold war, specifically propagated by public intellectuals such as Bernard Lewis and the

media commentators, such as Fareed Zakaria, who espouse his views. Islamophobia is not about Islam as an identity, rather it is a construct that cuts across party lines and is propagated by the global elite to maintain the agenda of global capitalism . In Sheehi's framework, Islamophobia began on the ashes of Orientalism, and found its sprouting and coming into being inside the Beltway think tanks. Similarly, we find in Deepa Kumar's text,"Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire," a situating of Islamophobia as a symptom of American imperial wars and engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. The implication for both Sheehi and Kumar are that large international coalitions should be formed to advocate for international justice through solidarity with other marginalized groups, and issues such as poverty eradication, Occupy Wall Street, and so on. Kumar points out that since 9/11, more than 700,000 Muslims have been interviewed by the FBI, which means that nearly 50 percent of all Muslim households have been touched by the FBI's "investigations" into Muslims. Saba Mahmoud writes in "Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation" about how the RAND Corporation, a prominent Washington think tank, in their publication, "Civil Democratic Islam," helped to frame the cultural and media campaign the U.S. government would undergo in response to the war on terror. Then-President Bush's creation of the "World Muslim Outreach" center was built not exactly on combatting violent extremism, according to Mahmoud, but on identifying and creating a Muslim subject that can fit into the goals of American interests overseas. The report argues that the government, through a number of different agencies working in loose concert, must identify the right type of Muslims to partner with. The goal of these efforts must result in a new interpretation of Islam on behalf of Muslims. The Quran must remain at the level of symbols and of metaphor, of allegory, but not literal truth. This think tank report recognize that moderate Muslims don't actually see the Quran this way, and many are what the report calls "traditionalists," i.e., they hold a view of the Quran as the true word of God, and these are the Muslims that are poised as suspect to U.S. interests. It is the reformers and the secularists

that are the ones to that the U.S. should connect with and build alliances with to support U.S. interests. The strategy for combatting Islamophobia according to this model is highly critical of any attempt to normalize Muslims into processes of power. They place critique of the systems that subject Muslims to surveillance as more significant than seeking to fit into a normative western society. By placing critique above integration, this model risks forever being the practice of academics and civil rights activists. In Sheehi's framework, any attempt to defend Islam as a peaceful religion will tend to further entrench the dichotomies of the "good Muslim" vs. the "bad Muslim" that exists as a stereotypical

construct. In short, this model is difficult for many Muslim American families and civic leaders that wish to integrate into American society, but it is extraordinary helpful in its diagnosis of the cause of Islamophobia. The Integrationist Model The second model I have

identified in the literature on Islamophobia is what I refer to as the "integrationist" approach. In this view, the primary cause of Islamophobia is a more general fear of otherness, tied to a lack of inter-personal relations and contact with Muslims in western societies. Key books and studies that support this view include Robert Putnam and David Campbell's "American Grace: How Religions Divides and Unites Us," Eboo Patel's "Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America" and many think tank publications from groups that research Islamophobia, including the Brookings Institute, as well as the State Department.

In this model, strategies for combatting Islamophobia are centered on education about Islam and building personal relations with Muslims. They tend not to encourage civil disobedience, or to situate the cause of

Islamophobia in the context of a larger critique of American power or foreign policy. Muslims in America are frequently compared to other ethnic minority communities that fought for a place at the table such as the Japanese, the Catholics or

African Americans. But the question these books pose is the classic debate that many African American thinkers have posed after the civil rights movement: are we advocating an assimilation or an integration into American society? The integrationists promote the idea of building a relation with a Muslim as the cure to

Islamophobia. This theory has some compelling proof in the social science literature where it is referred to as "contact theory." The idea here is that through personal contact with the other, in this case a Muslim, the prejudice or potential to be prejudicial also falls by the wayside. Robert Putnam, a Harvard sociologist, argues in "American Grace" that education about religion is less important for lessening prejudice than is fostering personal relationships. Robert Wright picked up Putnam's notion when he pointed that the best way to combat Islamophobia is to get more Americans to know a Muslim, which is how America become less phobic toward the LGBT community. Wright argues that by getting to know the other as a colleague and a family member, the practice of "coming out of the closet"

steadily became more and more acceptable over time precisely because people got to know the other outside of their identity which was demonized in popular culture. This "bridging model," where the Other is seen as a normal, everyday person with the same hopes, desires and dreams as anyone else helps to make them more easily accepted as a human outside of the stereotyped identity. Wright goes on to point out that the challenge for Muslims in the west is one of numbers: they are low in population and thus it may not be possible to promote a wide adoption of acceptance of Muslims until more people actually come into contact with practicing Muslims. The Danger in the Integrationist Model Where the strategy for

acceptance falls short is at the level of acceptance. It suggests that one must enter into some neutralized sphere that does not preserve or even celebrate the religious identity of the other. Once the other has been accepted in this neutral space, will the other, in this

case, the Muslim, be permitted to more authentically express their religious identity in the future? This engagement with the other that is predicated on a refusal to engage their authentic identity points to a danger in the larger integrationist view. By stressing commonness not based on preserving and sharing one's religious identity, but based on first encountering the other outside of their identity, we deprive the free expression of Muslim identity and we force Muslims to be subject to the status of an enemy . The political philosopher Carl Schmitt defines the enemy as whoever is "in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible." What many authors have pointed out in the critical model is that Muslim identity is seized and converted into an "in and an out" status in the public sphere. Muslims are either the enemy of the west, the Other, the non-Christian, the one religion or culture that can't

fit into ours (Islamophobic side) or Muslims are the ones that are our friends (Islamophilic side). The integrationist model thus presents a danger at the level of the identity of Muslims, forcing them to accept a false construction of what it means to be Muslim . This is a process that unfolds in the self, the family, the community, the nation-state and the trans-regional diaspora. Muslims are forced to take into account the prejudices and

expectations of an imagined, non-Muslim observer at all times when this dichotomy between the good Muslim vs. the bad Muslim. As a result, new distinctions between Self and Other are constantly woven into Muslim self-definitions. While the integrationist view of combatting Islamophobia usually results in higher levels of political influence and societal inclusion, it does come at a price. This price is what one scholar has referred to as "disciplinary inclusion." This idea of disciplinary inclusion was

highlighted in an excellent Stanford law review article entitled "Establishing an Official Islam" by Samuel Rascoff. Rascoff points out how the Obama administration's unique approach to collaboration with the Muslim community under the banner of "countering violent extremism" a new euphemism for countering terrorism, is to establish a version of Islam that is normative to the values of the United States government. By recruiting so called "moderate Muslims" as agents of the United States diplomatic efforts abroad in Muslim countries and having government officials attend

Islamic religious events and conferences, Rascoff argues that the government is promoting a threat to the establishment clause of the US Constitution and the First Amendment that preserves the right for private citizens to practice and define their religion without the incursion of any government agency . The ostensible efforts of the U.S. government here seem to be

well intentioned. They want to strengthen moderate Islam and help to portray certain moderate strands of Islam as the correct and acceptable version of Islam. But what ends up taking place is a form of Muslim identity that is regulated by the government, whereby the government goes to co-define what is normative within Islam, and what is not. While many Muslims in the U.S. and the west more broadly participate in these efforts to strengthen moderate Islam by collaborating with the government, it is at the same time, a mode of of the philosopher Michel Foucault called governmentality that perpetuates a sense of religious insiders and outsiders. Muslim Americans, for example, have already shown time and again that they are often the first responders to radicalism and that their version of Islam is not in need of governmental collaboration in this hands on manner. The truth is that Muslims living in the west, and around the world for that matter, have the most to lose when it comes to combatting radicalism in the name of their religion. This is why the Muslim community in Toronto turned in the suspects in the recent planned terrorist attack. While public condemnations of terrorism in the name of

Islam coming from Muslims are a good thing to hear, we have to understand that combatting Islamophobia is a much larger systemic challenge that requires a combination of both the integrationist personal engagement as well as the critical approach .

A2 USFG Inaccessible Reject their caricatures of US policy and Islam – the aff cherry-pick policy failures and overlook huge areas of structural political progress Duss 13 (Matthew Duss. “Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire.” 2013. http://www. aucegypt.edu/gapp/cairoreview/pages/articleDetails.aspx?aid=255)//EMerz

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, various analytical frameworks have been proposed to understand the American relationship with the Middle East. In Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, scholar Deepa Kumar offers a look at the role of Islamophobia in the West and argues that it continues to inform U.S. foreign policy for both conservatives and liberals. By echoing and updating Edward Said’s critique, which holds that Orientalism continues to dominate much of Western academic study of the region, Kumar argues that, just as the creation of an exotic, irrational Muslim “other” facilitated European empires’ colonial subjugation of the Middle East, so too has a reductive, essentialist view of Islam been deployed to justify America’s military interventions since 9/11. Kumar makes the case well—it’s not hard to find evidence for this. After all, following 9/11 Americans were fed a steady diet of images featuring Muslim violence, interspersed with claims regarding the centrality of such violence to the faith. In addition, half-baked treatises like Bernard Lewis’ What Went Wrong: The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East—in which the vaunted historian pointed to Middle Easterners’ failure to embrace European classical music as evidence of… well, I’m still not sure—were hailed as very serious arguments by very serious people. And the idea that American intervention was required to vault Muslims into the future did eventually help put American troops in Iraq. Somewhat more provocative, and problematic, is the second half of Kumar’s argument: that Islamophobia in the U.S. continues to be a joint project between American conservatives and liberals. While the contours of conservative Islamophobia are familiar (Islam is intrinsically hostile to modernity, freedom, and the American way, etc.), its liberal variant is, in Kumar’s view, equally pernicious. “The key characteristics of liberal Islamophobia,” Kumar writes, “are the rejection of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, the recognition that there are ‘good Muslims’ with whom diplomatic relations can be forged and a concomitant willingness to work with moderate Islamists.” While Kumar grants that “liberal Islamophobia may be rhetorically gentler” than the conservative version, she insists that it nonetheless “reserves the right of the U.S. to wage war against ‘Islamic terrorism’ around the world, with no respect for the right of self-determination by people in the countries it targets.” It is, Kumar concludes, “the ‘white man’s burden’ in sheep’s clothing.” To be fair, there is some evidence of liberals’ collaboration, or at least pandering to, Islamophobia when it suits their political needs. The spectacle of Democrats attacking the Bush administration over the 2006 Dubai Ports World deal is one unfortunate example. To advance this argument further, however, Kumar resorts to stealing a few bases. Claiming that liberals went along with conservative efforts to spread fear about the Muslim background of candidate Barack Obama, Kumar cites a May 2008 New York Times Op-Ed by Edward Luttwak (identified as “a fellow at the realist/liberal imperialist think tank” Center for Strategic and International Studies) in which he wrote that, as Obama was born to a Muslim father, his conversion to Christianity is a crime “under Muslim law.” But citing Luttwak and CSIS as “liberals” is problematic. Luttwak is a conservative-realist, and CSIS is a firmly centrist organization (full disclosure: I was a CSIS research intern some years ago.) Kumar also neglects to mention that the piece was savaged by many in the media, including within the New York Times itself—Public Editor Clark Hoyt essentially apologized for the piece’s irresponsible

assertions. Viewing the Obama administration’s surge strategy in Afghanistan through the darkest possible lens, Kumar writes, “One might speculate that a White House eager to prime public opinion for a troop surge of thirty thousand may have even encouraged a pliant media to devote attention to ‘homegrown terrorism.’” Indeed Kumar is left merely to speculate, in the absence of any proof of such a scheme. The idea that the Obama administration so trafficked in Islamophobia is somewhat outlandish given the criticism administration officials faced for refusing to specifically cite the Islamic faith as a cause of terrorism (memorably illustrated by Rep. Lamar Smith’s badgering of Attorney General Eric Holder in May 2010). The problem with defining Islamophobia as broadly as Kumar does is that it threatens to divest the term of meaning. It is possible to condemn terrorism committed by Muslims in the name of religion, or to have serious concerns over the development of pluralistic democracy under Islamist-controlled governments, without being anti-Islam. What defines Islamophobia is the belief that terrorist violence is somehow inherent to Islam, or that democracy is incompatible with correct Islamic practice. In uncovering Islamophobia here, there, and everywhere, Kumar unfortunately gives form to the straw man arguments of actual Islamophobes, who often cry that they are being silenced for voicing any criticism of Muslims. It’s quite true that American political discourse continues to be shot through with ignorance of and hostility toward Islam, but it isn’t the full picture. Take, for example, the recent controversy over Newsweek’s “Muslim Rage” cover story. The cover line and accompanying essay by controversial Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali generated more discussion about the magazine’s Muslim baiting than about “Muslim rage” itself. While her promulgation of “liberal Islamophobia” is overwrought, Kumar valuably catalogues many of the ways in which American Muslims have been negatively affected by the “war on terror” discourse. She also takes aim at an important problem, if only in glancing: the failure of progressives to press the Obama administration on its civil liberties violations. Rather than locating the cause in deep-seated Islamophobia, however, we’d be just as likely to find it in political expediency. Even with its flaws though, this remains a valuable book. While Kumar’s framework doesn’t adequately capture the various levels and angles of U.S. engagement with the Middle East as a region, or with Islam as a faith, it does offer an important survey of the mistaken assumptions that continue to power some seriously flawed policies. As the U.S. develops better policies to engage with a transforming Middle East, and hopefully confronts the ongoing degradation of rights at home, the issues Kumar raises deserve to be taken seriously.

Speaking for Others K

1nc SFO KThe 1AC speaks from a privileged position of disinvestment with the stories of the Muslim Americans that they have chosen to tell—their universalization of Muslim subject positions isn’t an act of speaking on behalf of others, it’s an act of speaking for others and silencing the subaltern Kapoor, 8—Professor of Critical Development Studies at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University (Ilan, Spring 2008, "Introduction: Islam and Cultural Politics", Topia: Canadian Journal Of Cultural Studies, pg. 3-5)//twemchen

The Postcolonial View: Islam as Open and Political But there is another perspective on culture—a postcolonial one. Calling it postcolonial may be a sleight of hand, given that it has multiple variants and relies on several sources (cultural anthropology, cultural marxism, discursive analysis, deconstruction). I would like to draw out two themes for the purposes of this introduction. First, rather than asking Huntington’s “what is culture?” which gives way to the reification of culture, the postcolonial perspective asks “how is culture made?” emphasizing its more active and transformative role. Culture is seen as a semiotic practice (Geertz 1973) grounded in everyday life, through which shared signs and symbols are deployed to represent our world. Raymond Williams refers to it as “the signifying system through which necessarily ... a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced, and explored” (Williams 1982: 13; cf. Hall 1977: 328). Rather than focusing on cultural identity, which fixes and unifies culture, the idea here is to see culture as signifying process: this means that culture is dynamic rather than static , slippery and unfixed rather than stable, plural and hybrid rather than whole, and “negotiated and constructed rather than a ‘given’” (Clammer 2005: 103; cf. Williams 1979: 154; Bhabha 1994; Appadurai 1996: 12). The second theme of discursivity is what gives the postcolonial perspective its critical bent. The semiotic construction of culture involves a “ will to power ,” wherein knowledge is systematized and disseminated (Said 1978: 12; 1983: 216). This process includes the deployment of discursive strategies such as the use of rhetoric or the construction, repetition and reification of powerful images and stereotypes (Bhabha 1994: 66ff.; Derrida 1982: 307ff.), such as the images of Islam and Muslims discussed above. This critique also takes into account the enactment of discourse in institutional practices, for instance the state or corporate media which fund and widely disseminate a favoured body of knowledge. A power politics is thus at play, entailing domination of and/or contestation between representational practices. This postcolonial perspective enables us to view culture not as something separate and beyond, whose outlines can be precisely and objectively determined from afar (as in Huntington’s multiculturalism or Islamism), but rather as an immediate and inescapable shaping of experience. Its contours may well be shifting and imprecise, but we cannot view, interpret or make our world without it. Culture tints, filters, gives perspective; yet privileging one colour means excluding others; filtering in also means filtering out. Islam, in this view, is not a collection of clearly definable values or “customs,” but rather a contested terrain of lived practices and contingent interpretations. Fixating on one set of meanings—a “real” Islam or the “true” Muslim woman—is an attempt to contain, control or hierarchize the Other. Many of the contributions in this issue aim at unsettling the propagation of powerful stereotypes that reduce Islam or Muslim culture to a religious category, equate Muslims with terrorism or sexual perversion, or assume Islamic religious practice to be monolithic or static. Thus, Liz Philipose cautions against the feminist view that all “traditional” or Muslim law is necessarily oppressive to women. And Shahnaz Khan emphasizes that holding only local Afghan

patriarchies to account for Afghan women’s “oppression” is linked to a desire to “rescue 8women,” and may well be used as an argument to rationalize foreign military intervention. This contested cultural terrain obliges us to be more self-reflexive about, and accountable to, our positioning as privileged intellectuals, Western(ized) elites, or women or men; otherwise we run the risk of universalizing our positions or speaking for others, thus silencing the subaltern (Spivak 1988). This is certainly the argument put forth by Burwell, Davis and Taylor, who problematize their own pedagogical practices in general, and the reading of Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran in particular, within the current context of neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia. In response, they offer an expressly qualified and personalized hermeneutical account of Nafisi’s text. For the postcolonial critic, accountable positioning often means having to chart a complex course. Jasmin Zine speaks, in this regard, of having to confront oppression “from within and without” her community, that is, in a way that agrees with neither mainstream media arguments about Muslim women nor Islamist ones, and that resists both outwardly “secular” explanations and straightforwardly “religious” ones. This complex positioning often implies having to occupy a borderline position, on the margins of any mainstream. Yet such positioning, such contestation from the margins, is precisely what enables a “cultural politics”: it shows that culture does not only mediate our lives, but is the very site of agency and change. This is evident in Zine’s study of Muslim girls who challenge the gender-segregated spaces within their schools and attempt to negotiate a position that accommodates the status of women in Islam. It is evident in the work of women’s groups in North America and Nigeria which Liz Philipose highlights, that try to claim women’s rights by reinterpreting Islam in a feminist light. It is manifest in the “queer Muslim punk” groups described by Ibrahim Abraham; they demonstrate the possibility of same-sex intimacy without conforming to either the mainstream bourgeois hetero-homo binary or the hidden homosexual practices within Muslim communities. And finally, agency and change are apparent in Sayed Kashua’s book, Dancing Arabs, which, as Catherine Rottenberg tells us, challenges Jewish readers to re-examine their assumptions about Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. All of this lays bare notions of the West as necessarily culturally hegemonic, of Islam as homogeneous and fixed, and of Muslims as victims in need of rescue. The postcolonial view thus underlines the importance of culture to the contested present. It alerts us to how dominant contemporary discourses on Islam are constructed , and reveals their attempts to de- politicize, naturalize and mainstream their Orientalist depictions of Muslims. It warns against dominant strategies to centre or privilege some discourses (the corporate media, the nation-state, Western “civilization,” social elites, religious patriarchs) and produce others (Islam, Muslims, women, queers, the Third World). And it sensitizes us to those cultural acts of resistance aimed at interrogating, deflecting or re-presenting domination. The articles that follow in this special issue of TOPIA bring much needed attention to these important postcolonial insights and preoccupations.

Speaking for others re-enforces violence, coercion, and oppression while silencing Muslim Americans—their stories are inevitably twisted and construed to fit the current hierarchy of powerAlcoff, 91—Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies and the Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence at Syracuse University (Linda, Winter 1991, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique, No. 20, p. 5-32)//twemchenThese examples demonstrate the range of current practices of speaking for others in our society. While the prerogative of speaking for others remains unquestioned in the citadels of colonial administration, among activists and in the academy it elicits a growing unease and, in some communities of discourse, it is being rejected. There is a strong, albeit contested, current within feminism which holds that speaking for others---even for other women---is

arrogant, vain, unethical, and politically illegitimate. Feminist scholarship has a liberatory agenda which almost requires that women scholars speak on behalf of other women, and yet the dangers of speaking across differences of race, culture, sexuality, and power are becoming increasingly clear to all . In

feminist magazines such as Sojourner, it is common to find articles and letters in which the author states that she can only speak for herself. In her important paper, "Dyke Methods," Joyce Trebilcot offers a philosophical

articulation of this view. She renounces for herself the practice of speaking for others within a lesbian feminist community, arguing that she "will not try to get other wimmin to accept my beliefs in place of their own" on the grounds that to do so would be to practice a kind of discursive coercion and even a violence.3 Feminist discourse is not the only site in which the problem of speaking for others has been acknowledged and addressed. In anthropology there is similar discussion about whether it is possible to speak for others either adequately or justifiably. Trinh T. Minh-ha explains the grounds for

skepticism when she says that anthropology is "mainly a conversation of `us' with `us' about `them,' of the white man with the white man about the primitive-nature man...in which `them' is silenced. `Them' always stands on the other side of the hill, naked and speechless...`them' is only admitted among `us', the discussing subjects, when accompanied or introduced by an `us'..."4 Given this analysis, even ethnographies written by progressive anthropologists are a priori regressive because of the structural features of anthropological discursive practice. The recognition that there is a problem in speaking for others has followed from the widespread acceptance of two

claims. First, there has been a growing awareness that where one speaks from affects both the meaning and truth of what one says, and thus that one cannot assume an ability to transcend her location . In other words, a speaker's location (which I take here to refer to her social location or social identity) has an epistemically significant impact on that speaker's claims, and can serve either to authorize or dis-authorize one's speech. The creation of Women's Studies and African

American Studies departments were founded on this very belief: that both the study of and the advocacy for the oppressed must come to be done principally by the oppressed themselves, and that we must finally acknowledge that systematic divergences in social location between speakers and those spoken for will have a significant effect on the content of what is said. The unspoken premise here is simply that a speaker's location is epistemically

salient. I shall explore this issue further in the next section. The second claim holds that not only is location epistemically salient , but certain privileged locations are discursively dangerous .5 In particular, the practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has actually resulted (in many cases) in increasing or reenforcing the oppression of the group spoken for . This was part of the argument made against Anne Cameron's speaking for Native women: Cameron's intentions were never in question, but the effects

of her writing were argued to be harmful to the needs of Native authors because it is Cameron rather than they who will be listened to and whose books will be bought by readers interested in Native women. Persons from dominant groups who speak for others are often treated as authenticating presences that confer legitimacy and credibility on the demands of subjugated speakers; such speaking for others does nothing to disrupt the discursive hierarchies that operate in public spaces . For this reason, the work of privileged authors who speak on

behalf of the oppressed is becoming increasingly criticized by members of those oppressed groups themselves.6 As social theorists, we are authorized by virtue of our academic positions to develop theories that express and encompass the ideas, needs, and goals of others. However, we must begin to ask ourselves whether this is ever a legitimate authority, and if so, what are the criteria for legitimacy? In particular, is it ever valid to speak for others who are unlike me or who are less privileged than me? We might try to delimit this problem as only arising when a more privileged person speaks for a less privileged one. In this case, we might say that I should only speak for groups of which I am a member. But this does not tell us how groups themselves should be delimited. For example, can a white woman speak for all women simply by virtue of being a woman? If not, how narrowly should we draw the categories? The complexity and multiplicity of group identifications could result in "communities" composed of single individuals. Moreover, the concept of groups assumes specious notions about clear-cut boundaries and "pure" identities. I am a Panamanian-American and a person of mixed ethnicity and race: half white/Angla and half Panamanian mestiza. The criterion of group identity leaves many unanswered questions for a person such as myself, since I have membership in many conflicting groups but my membership in all of them is problematic. Group identities and boundaries are ambiguous and permeable, and decisions about demarcating identity are always partly arbitrary. Another problem concerns how specific an identity needs to be to confer epistemic authority. Reflection on such problems quickly reveals that no easy solution to the problem of speaking for others can be found by simply restricting the practice to speaking for groups of which one is a member. Adopting the position that one should only speak for oneself raises similarly difficult questions. If I don't speak for those less privileged than myself, am I abandoning my political responsibility to speak out against oppression, a responsibility incurred by the very fact of my privilege? If I should not speak for others, should I restrict myself to following their lead uncritically? Is my greatest contribution to move over and get out of the way? And if so, what is the best way to do this---to keep silent or to deconstruct my own discourse? The answers to these questions will certainly depend on who is asking them. While some of us may want to undermine, for example, the U.S. government's practice of speaking for the "Third world," we may not want to undermine someone such as Rigoberta Menchu's ability to speak for Guatemalan Indians.7 So the question arises about whether all instances of speaking for should be condemned and, if not, how we can justify a position which would repudiate some speakers while accepting others. In order to answer these questions we need to become clearer on the epistemological and metaphysical issues which are involved in the articulation of the problem of speaking for others, issues which most often remain implicit. I will attempt to make these issues clear before turning to discuss some of the possible responses to the problem and advancing a provisional, procedural solution of my own. But first I need to explain further my framing of the problem. In the examples

used above, there may appear to be a conflation between the issue of speaking for others and the issue of speaking about others. This conflation was intentional on my part, because it is difficult to distinguish speaking about from speaking for in all cases. There is an ambiguity in the two phrases: when one is

speaking for another one may be describing their situation and thus also speaking about them. In fact, it may be impossible to speak for another without simultaneously conferring information about them. Similarly, when one is speaking about another, or simply trying to describe their situation or some aspect of it, one may also be speaking in place of them, i.e. speaking for them. One may be speaking about another as an advocate or a messenger if the person cannot speak for herself. Thus I would maintain that if the practice of speaking for others is problematic, so too must be the practice of speaking about others.8 This is partly the case because of what has been called the "crisis of representation." For in both the practice of speaking for as well as the practice of speaking about others, I am engaging in the act of representing the other's needs, goals, situation, and in fact, who they are, based on my own situated interpretation. In post-structuralist terms, I am participating in the construction of their subject-positions rather than simply discovering their true selves. Once we pose it as a problem of representation, we see that, not only are speaking for and speaking about analytically close, so too are the practices of speaking for others and speaking for myself. For, in speaking for myself, I am also representing my self in a certain way, as occupying a specific subject-position, having certain characteristics and not others, and so on. In speaking for myself, I (momentarily) create my self---just as much as when I speak for others I create them as a public, discursive self, a self which is more unified than any subjective experience can support. And this public self will in most cases have an effect on the self experienced as interiority. The point here is that the problem of representation underlies all cases of speaking for, whether I am speaking for myself or for others. This is not to suggest that all representations are fictions: they have very real material effects, as well as material origins, but they are always mediated in complex ways by discourse, power, and location. However, the problem of speaking for others is more specific than the problem of representation generally, and requires its own particular analysis. There is one final point I want to make before we can pursue this analysis. The way I have articulated this problem may imply that individuals make conscious choices about their discursive practice free of ideology and the constraints of material reality. This is not what I wish to imply. The problem of speaking for others is a social one, the options available to us are socially constructed, and the practices we engage in cannot be understood as simply the results of autonomous individual choice. Yet to replace both "I" and "we" with a passive voice that erases agency results in an erasure of responsibility and accountability for one's speech, an erasure I would strenuously argue against (there is too little responsibility-taking already in Western practice!). When we sit down to write, or get up to speak, we experience ourselves as making choices. We may experience hesitation from fear of being criticized or from fear of exacerbating a problem we would like to remedy, or we may experience a resolve to speak despite existing obstacles, but in many cases we experience having the possibility to speak or not to speak. On the one hand, a theory which explains this experience as involving autonomous choices free of material structures would be false and ideological, but on the other hand, if we do not acknowledge the activity of choice and the experience of individual doubt, we are denying a reality of our experiential lives.9 So I see the argument of this paper as addressing that small space of discursive agency we all experience, however multi-layered, fictional, and constrained it in fact is. Ultimately, the question of speaking for others bears crucially on the possibility of political effectivity. Both collective action and coalitions would seem to require the possibility of speaking for. Yet influential postmodernists such as Gilles Deleuze have characterized as "absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others"10 and important feminist theorists have renounced the practice as irretrievably harmful. What is at stake in rejecting or validating speaking for others as a discursive practice? To answer this, we must become clearer on the epistemological and metaphysical claims which are implicit in the articulation of the problem. I. A plethora of sources have argued in this century that the neutrality of the theorizer can no longer, can never again, be sustained, even for a moment. Critical theory, discourses of empowerment, psychoanalytic theory, post-structuralism, feminist and anti-colonialist theories have all concurred on this point. Who is speaking to whom turns out to be as important for meaning and truth as what is said; in fact what is said turns out to change according to who is speaking and who is listening. Following Foucault, I will call these "rituals of speaking" to identify discursive practices of speaking or writing which involve not only the text or utterance but their position within a social space which includes the persons involved in, acting upon, and/or affected by the words. Two elements within these rituals will deserve our attention: the positionality or location of the speaker and the discursive context. We can take the latter to refer to the connections and relations of involvement between the utterance/text and other utterances and texts as well as the material practices in the relevant environment, which should not be confused with an environment spatially adjacent to the particular discursive event. Rituals of speaking are constitutive of meaning, the meaning of the words spoken as well as the meaning of the event. This claim requires us to shift the ontology of meaning from its location in a text or utterance to a larger space, a space which includes the text or utterance but which also includes the discursive context. And an important implication of this claim is that meaning must be understood as plural and shifting, since a single text can engender diverse meanings given diverse contexts. Not only what is emphasized, noticed, and how it is understood will be affected by the location of both speaker and hearer, but the truth-value or epistemic status will also be affected. For example, in many situations when a woman speaks the presumption is against her; when a man speaks he is usually taken seriously (unless his speech patterns mark him as socially inferior by dominant standards). When writers from oppressed races and nationalities have insisted that all writing is political the claim has been dismissed as foolish or grounded in ressentiment or it is simply ignored; when prestigious European philosophers say that all writing is political it is taken up as a new and original "truth" (Judith Wilson calls this "the intellectual equivalent of the `cover record'.")11 The rituals of speaking which involve the location of speaker and listeners affect whether a claim is taken as true, well-reasoned, a compelling argument, or a significant idea. Thus, how what is said gets heard depends on who says it, and who says it will affect the style and language in which it is stated. The discursive style in which some European post-structuralists have made the claim that all writing is political marks it as important and likely to be true for a certain (powerful) milieu; whereas the style in which African-American writers made the same claim marked their speech as dismissable in the eyes of the same milieu. This point might be conceded by those who admit to the political mutability of interpretation, but they might continue to maintain that truth is a different matter altogether. And they would be right that acknowledging the effect of location on meaning and even on whether something is taken as true within a particular discursive context does not entail that the "actual" truth of the claim is contingent upon its context. However, this objection presupposes a particular conception of truth, one in which the truth of a statement can be distinguished from its interpretation and its acceptance. Such a concept would require truth to be independent of the speakers' or listeners' embodied and perspectival location. Thus, the question of whether location bears simply on what is taken to be true or what is really true, and whether such a distinction can be upheld, involves the very difficult problem of the meaning of truth. In the history of Western philosophy, there have existed multiple, competing definitions and ontologies of truth: correspondence, idealist,

pragmatist, coherentist, and consensual notions. The dominant modernist view has been that truth represents a relationship of correspondence between a proposition and an extra-discursive reality. On this view, truth is about a realm completely independent of human action and expresses things "as they are in themselves," that is, free of human interpretation. Arguably since Kant, more obviously since Hegel, it has been widely accepted that an understanding of truth which requires it to be free of human interpretation leads inexorably to skepticism, since it makes truth inaccessible by definition. This created an impetus to reconfigure the ontology of truth, from a locus outside human interpretation to one within it. Hegel, for example, understood truth as an "identity in difference" between subjective and objective elements. Thus, in the Hegelian aftermath, so-called subjective elements, or the historically specific conditions in which human knowledge occurs, are no longer rendered irrelevant or even obstacles to truth. On a coherentist account of truth, which is held by such philosophers as Rorty, Donald Davidson, Quine, and (I would argue) Gadamer and Foucault, truth is defined as an emergent property of converging discursive and non-discursive elements, when there exists a specific form of integration among these elements in a particular event. Such a view has no necessary relationship to idealism, but it allows us to understand how the social location of the speaker can be said to bear on truth. The speaker's location is one of the elements which converge to produce meaning and thus to determine epistemic validity.12 Let me return now to the formulation of the problem of speaking for others. There are two premises implied by the articulation of the problem, and unpacking these should advance our understanding of the issues involved. Premise (1): The "ritual of speaking" (as defined above) in which an utterance is located always bears on meaning and truth such that there is no possibility of rendering positionality, location, or context irrelevant to content. The phrase "bears on" here should indicate some variable amount of influence short of determination or fixing. One important implication of this first premise is that we can no longer determine the validity of a given instance of speaking for others simply by asking whether or not the speaker has done sufficient research to justify her claims. Adequate research will be a necessary but

insufficient criterion of evaluation. Now let us look at the second premise. Premise (2): All contexts and locations are differentially related in complex ways to structures of oppression. Given that truth is connected to politics, these political differences between locations will produce epistemic differences as well. The claim here that "truth is connected to politics" follows necessarily from Premise (1). Rituals of speaking are politically constituted by power relations of domination, exploitation, and subordination. Who is speaking, who is spoken of, and who listens is a result, as well as an act, of political struggle . Simply put, the discursive context is a political arena. To the extent that this context bears on meaning, and meaning is in some sense the object of truth, we cannot make an epistemic evaluation of the claim without simultaneously assessing the politics of the situation . Although we cannot maintain a neutral voice, according to the first

premise we may at least all claim the right and legitimacy to speak. But the second premise suggests that some voices may be dis-authorized on grounds which are simultaneously political and epistemic. Any statement will invoke the structures of power allied with the social location of the speaker, aside from the speaker's intentions or

attempts to avoid such invocations. The conjunction of Premises (1) and (2) suggest that the speaker loses some portion of control over the meaning and truth of her utterance. Given that the context of hearers is partially determinant, the speaker is not the master or mistress of the situation. Speakers may seek to regain control here by taking into account

the context of their speech, but they can never know everything about this context, and with written and electronic communication it is becoming increasingly difficult to know anything at all about the context of reception. This

loss of control may be taken by some speakers to mean that no speaker can be held accountable for her discursive actions. The meaning of any discursive event will be shifting and plural, fragmented and even inconsistent . As it ranges over diverse spaces and transforms in the mind of its recipients according to their different horizons of interpretation, the effective control of the speaker over the meanings which she puts in motion may seem negligible . However, a partial loss of control does not entail a

complete loss of accountability. And moreover, the better we understand the trajectories by which meanings proliferate, the more likely we can increase, though always only partially, our ability to direct the interpretations and transformations our speech undergoes. When I acknowledge that the listener's social location will affect the meaning of my words, I can more effectively generate the meaning I intend. Paradoxically, the view which holds the speaker or author of a speech act as solely responsible for its meanings ensures the speaker's least effective determinacy over the meanings that are produced. We do not need to posit the existence of fully conscious acts or containable, fixed meanings in order to hold that speakers can alter their discursive practices and be held accountable for at least some of the effects of these practices. It is a false dilemma to pose the choice here as one between no accountability or complete causal power. In the next section I shall consider some of the principal responses offered to the problem of speaking for others. II. First I want to consider the argument that the very formulation of the problem with speaking for others involves a retrograde, metaphysically insupportable essentialism that assumes one can read off the truth and meaning of what one says straight from the discursive context. Let's call this response the "Charge of Reductionism", because it argues that a sort of reductionist theory of justification (or evaluation) is entailed by premises (1) and (2). Such a reductionist theory might, for example, reduce evaluation to a political assessment of the speaker's location where that location is seen as an insurmountable essence that fixes one, as if one's feet are superglued to a spot on the sidewalk. For instance, after I vehemently defended Barbara Christian's article, "The Race for Theory," a male friend who had a different evaluation of the piece couldn't help raising the possibility of whether a sort of apologetics structured my response, motivated by a desire to valorize African American writing against all odds. His question in effect raised the issue of the reductionist/essentialist theory of justification I just described. I, too, would reject reductionist theories of justification and essentialist accounts of what it means to have a location. To say that location bears on meaning and truth is not the same as saying that location determines meaning and truth. And location is not a fixed essence absolutely authorizing one's speech in the way that God's favor absolutely authorized the speech of Moses. Location and positionality should not be conceived as one-dimensional or static, but as multiple and with varying degrees of mobility.13 What it means, then, to speak from or within a group and/or a location is immensely complex. To the extent that location is not a fixed essence, and to the extent that there is an uneasy, underdetermined, and contested relationship between location on the one hand and meaning and truth on the other, we cannot reduce evaluation of meaning and truth to a simple identification of the speaker's location. Neither Premise (1) nor Premise (2) entail reductionism or essentialism. They argue for the relevance of location, not its singular power of determination, and they are non-committal on how to construe the metaphysics of location. While the "Charge of Reductionism" response has been popular among academic theorists, what I call the "Retreat" response has been popular among some sections of the U.S. feminist movement. This response is simply to retreat from all practices of speaking for; it asserts that one can only know one's own narrow individual experience and one's "own truth" and thus that one can never make claims beyond this. This response is motivated in part by the desire to recognize difference and different priorities, without organizing these differences into hierarchies. Now, sometimes I think this is the proper response to the problem of speaking for others, depending on who is making it. We certainly want to encourage a more receptive listening on the part of the discursively privileged and to discourage presumptuous and oppressive practices of speaking for. And the desire to retreat sometimes results from the desire to engage in political work but without practicing what might be called discursive imperialism. But a retreat from speaking for will not result in an increase in receptive listening in all cases; it may result merely in a retreat into a narcissistic yuppie lifestyle in which a privileged person takes no responsibility for her society whatsoever. She may even feel justified in exploiting her privileged capacity for personal happiness at the expense of others on the grounds that she has no alternative. The major problem with such a retreat is that it significantly undercuts the possibility of political effectivity. There are numerous examples of the practice of speaking for others which have been politically efficacious in advancing the needs of those spoken for, from Rigoberta Menchu to Edward Said and Steven Biko. Menchu's efforts to speak for the 33 Indian communities facing genocide in Guatemala have helped to raise money for the revolution and bring pressure against the Guatemalan and U.S. governments who have committed the massacres in collusion. The point is not that for some speakers the danger of speaking for others does not arise, but that in some cases certain political effects can be garnered in no other way. Joyce Trebilcot's version of the retreat response, which I mentioned at the outset of this essay, raises other issues. She agrees that an absolute prohibition of speaking for would undermine political effectiveness, and therefore says that she will avoid speaking for others only within her lesbian feminist community. So it might be argued that the retreat from speaking for others can be maintained without sacrificing political effectivity if it is restricted to particular discursive spaces. Why might one advocate such a partial retreat? Given that interpretations and meanings are discursive constructions made by embodied speakers, Trebilcot worries that attempting to persuade or speak for another will cut off that person's ability or willingness to engage in the constructive act of developing meaning. Since no embodied speaker can produce more than a partial account, and since

the process of producing meaning is necessarily collective, everyone's account within a specified community needs to be encouraged. I agree with a great deal of Trebilcot's argument. I certainly agree that in some instances speaking for others constitutes a violence and should be stopped . But Trebilcot's position, as well as a more general retreat

position, presumes an ontological configuration of the discursive context that simply does not obtain. In particular, it assumes that one can retreat into one's discrete location and make claims entirely and singularly within that location that do not range over others, and therefore that one can disentangle oneself from the implicating networks between one's discursive practices and others' locations, situations, and practices. In other words, the claim that I can speak only for myself assumes the autonomous conception of the self in Classical Liberal theory--that I am unconnected to others in my authentic self or that I can achieve an autonomy from others given certain conditions. But there is no neutral place to stand free and clear in which one's words do not prescriptively affect or mediate the experience of others, nor is there a way to demarcate decisively a boundary between one's location and all others. Even a complete retreat from speech is of course not neutral since it allows the continued dominance of current discourses and acts by omission to reenforce their dominance. As my practices are made possible by events spatially far away from my body so too my own practices make possible or impossible practices of others. The declaration that I "speak only for myself" has the sole effect of allowing me to avoid responsibility and accountability for my effects on others; it cannot literally erase those effects. Let me offer an illustration of this. The feminist movement in the U.S. has spawned many kinds of support groups for women with various needs: rape victims, incest survivors, battered wives, and so forth, and some of these groups have been structured around the view that each survivor must come to her own "truth" which ranges only over herself and has no bearing on others. Thus, one woman's experience of sexual assault, its effect on her and her interpretation of it, should not be taken as a universal generalization to which others must subsume or conform their experience. This view works only up to a point. To the extent it recognizes irreducible differences in the way people respond to various traumas and is sensitive to the genuinely variable way in which women can heal themselves, it represents real progress beyond the homogeneous, universalizing approach which sets out one road for all to follow. However, it is an illusion to think that, even in the safe space of a support group, a member of the group can, for example, trivialize brother-sister incest as "sex play" without profoundly harming someone else in the group who is trying to maintain her realistic assessment of her brother's sexual activities with her as a harmful assault against his adult rationalization that "well, for me it was just harmless fun." Even if the speaker offers a dozen caveats about her views as restricted to her location, she will still affect the other woman's ability to conceptualize and interpret her experience and her response to it. And this is simply because we cannot neatly separate off our mediating praxis which interprets and constructs our experiences from the praxis of others. We are collectively caught in an intricate, delicate web in which each action I take, discursive or otherwise, pulls on, breaks off, or maintains the tension in many strands of the web in which others find themselves moving also. When I speak for myself, I am constructing a possible self, a way to be in the world, and am offering that, whether I intend to or not, to others, as one possible way to be. Thus, the attempt to avoid the problematic of speaking for by retreating into an individualist realm is based on an illusion, well supported in the individualist ideology of the West, that a self is not constituted by multiple intersecting discourses but consists in a unified whole capable of autonomy from others. It is an illusion that I can separate from others to such an extent that I can avoid affecting them. This may be the intention of my speech, and even its meaning if we take that to be the formal entailments of the sentences, but it will not be the effect of the speech, and therefore cannot capture the speech in its reality as a discursive practice. When I "speak for myself" I am participating in the creation and reproduction of discourses through which my own and other selves are constituted. A further problem with the "Retreat" response is that it may be motivated by a desire to find a method or practice immune from criticism. If I speak only for myself it may appear that I am immune from criticism because I am not making any claims that describe others or prescribe actions for them. If I am only speaking for myself I have no responsibility for being true to your experience or needs. But surely it is both morally and politically objectionable to structure one's

actions around the desire to avoid criticism, especially if this outweighs other questions of effectivity. In some cases, the motivation is perhaps not so much to avoid criticism as to avoid errors, and the person believes that the only way to avoid errors is to avoid all speaking for others. However, errors are unavoidable in theoretical inquiry as well as political struggle, and they usually make contributions. The pursuit of an absolute means to avoid making errors comes perhaps not from a desire to advance collective goals but a desire for personal mastery, to establish a privileged discursive position wherein one cannot be undermined or challenged and thus is master of the situation. From such a position one's own location and positionality would not require constant interrogation and critical reflection; one would not have to constantly engage in this emotionally troublesome endeavor and would be

immune from the interrogation of others. Such a desire for mastery and immunity must be resisted. The final response to the problem of speaking for others that I

will consider occurs in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's rich essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?"14 Spivak rejects a total retreat from speaking for others, and she criticizes the "self-abnegating intellectual" pose that Foucault and Deleuze

adopt when they reject speaking for others on the grounds that their position assumes the oppressed can transparently represent their own true interests. According to Spivak, Foucault and Deleuze's self-abnegation serves only to conceal the actual authorizing power of the retreating intellectuals, who in their very retreat help to consolidate

a particular conception of experience (as transparent and self-knowing). Thus, to promote "listening to" as opposed to speaking for essentializes the oppressed as non-ideologically constructed subjects. But Spivak is also critical of speaking for which engages in dangerous re-presentations. In the end Spivak prefers a "speaking to," in which the intellectual neither abnegates his or her discursive role nor presumes an authenticity of the oppressed, but still allows for the possibility that the oppressed will produce a "countersentence" that can then suggest a new historical narrative. Spivak's arguments show that a simple solution can not be found in for the oppressed or less privileged being able to speak for themselves, since their speech will not necessarily be either liberatory or reflective of their "true interests", if such exist. I agree with her on this point but I would emphasize also that ignoring the subaltern's or oppressed person's speech is, as she herself notes, "to continue the imperialist project."15 Even if the oppressed person's speech is not liberatory in its content, it remains the case that the very act of speaking itself constitutes a subject that challenges and subverts the opposition between the knowing agent and the object of knowledge, an opposition which has served as a key player in the reproduction of imperialist modes of discourse. Thus, the problem with speaking for others exists in the very structure of discursive practice, irrespective of its content, and subverting the hierarchical rituals of speaking will always have some liberatory effects. I agree, then, that we should strive to create wherever possible the conditions for dialogue and the practice of speaking with and to rather than speaking for others. Often the possibility of dialogue is left unexplored or inadequately pursued by more privileged persons. Spaces in which it may seem as if it is impossible to engage in dialogic encounters need to be transformed in order to do so, such as classrooms, hospitals, workplaces, welfare agencies, universities, institutions for international development and aid, and governments. It has long been noted that existing communication technologies have the potential to produce these kinds of interaction even though research and development teams have not found it advantageous under capitalism to do so. However, while there is much theoretical and practical work to be done to develop such alternatives, the practice of speaking for others remains the best option in some existing situations. An absolute retreat weakens political effectivity, is based on a metaphysical illusion, and often effects only an obscuring of the intellectual's power. There can be no complete or definitive solution to the problem of speaking for others, but there is a possibility that its dangers can be decreased. The remainder of this paper will try to contribute toward developing that possibility. III. In rejecting a general retreat from speaking for, I am not advocating a return to an unself-conscious appropriation of the other, but rather that anyone who speaks for others should only do so out of a concrete analysis of the particular power relations and discursive effects involved. I want to develop this point by elucidating four sets of interrogatory practices which are meant to help evaluate possible and actual instances of speaking for. In list form they may appear to resemble an algorithm, as if we could plug in an instance of speaking for and factor out an analysis and evaluation. However, they are meant only to suggest the questions that should be asked concerning any such discursive practice. These are by no means original: they have been learned

and practiced by many activists and theorists. (1) The impetus to speak must be carefully analyzed and, in many cases (certainly for academics!),

fought against. This may seem an odd way to begin discussing how to speak for, but the point is that the impetus to always be the speaker and to speak in all situations

must be seen for what it is: a desire for mastery and domination . If one's immediate impulse is to teach rather than listen to a less-privileged speaker , one should resist that impulse long enough to interrogate it carefully. Some of us have been taught that by right of having the dominant gender, class, race, letters after our name, or some other criterion, we are more likely to have the truth. Others have been taught the opposite and will speak haltingly , with apologies, if they speak at all. 16 At the same time, we have to acknowledge that the very decision to "move over" or retreat can occur only from a position of

privilege. Those who are not in a position of speaking at all cannot retreat from an action they do not employ. Moreover, making the decision for oneself whether or not to retreat is an extension or application of privilege, not an

abdication of it. Still, it is sometimes called for. (2) We must also interrogate the bearing of our location and context on what it is we are saying, and this should be an explicit part of every serious discursive practice we engage in. Constructing

hypotheses about the possible connections between our location and our words is one way to begin. This procedure would be most successful if engaged in collectively with others, by which aspects of our location less obvious to

us might be revealed.17 One deformed way in which this is too often carried out is when speakers offer up in the spirit of "honesty" autobiographical information about themselves, usually at the beginning of their discourse as a kind of disclaimer. This is meant to acknowledge their own understanding that they are speaking from a specified, embodied location

without pretense to a transcendental truth. But as Maria Lugones and others have forcefully argued, such an act serves no good end when it is used as a disclaimer against one's ignorance or errors and is made without critical interrogation of the bearing of such an autobiography on what is about to be said. It leaves for the listeners all the real work that needs to be done. For example, if a middle class white man were to

begin a speech by sharing with us this autobiographical information and then using it as a kind of apologetics for any limitations of his speech, this would leave to those of us in the audience who do not share his social location all the work of translating his terms into our own, apprising the applicability of his analysis to our diverse situation, and determining the substantive relevance of his location on his claims. This is simply what less-privileged persons have always had to do for ourselves when reading the history of philosophy, literature, etc., which makes the task of appropriating these discourses more difficult and time-consuming (and alienation more likely to result). Simple unanalyzed disclaimers do not improve on this familiar situation and may even make it worse to the extent that by offering such information the speaker may feel even more authorized to speak and be accorded more authority by his peers. (3) Speaking should always carry with it an accountability and responsibility for what one says. To whom one is accountable is a political/epistemological choice contestable, contingent and, as Donna Haraway says, constructed through the process of discursive action. What this entails in practice is a serious commitment to remain open to criticism and to attempt actively, attentively, and sensitively to "hear" the criticism (understand it). A quick impulse to reject criticism must make one wary. (4) Here is my central point. In order to evaluate attempts to speak for others in particular instances, we need to analyze the probable or actual effects of the words on the discursive and material context. One cannot simply look at the location of the speaker or her credentials to speak; nor can one look merely at the propositional content of the speech; one must also look at where the speech goes and what it does there. Looking merely at the content of a set of claims without looking at their effects cannot produce an adequate or even meaningful evaluation of it, and this is partly because the notion of a content separate from effects does not hold up. The content of the claim, or its meaning, emerges in interaction between words and hearers within a very specific historical situation. Given this, we have to pay careful attention to the discursive arrangement in order to understand the full meaning of any given discursive event. For example, in a situation where a well-meaning First world person is speaking for a person or group in the Third world, the very discursive arrangement may reinscribe the "hierarchy of civilizations" view where the U. S. lands squarely at the top. This effect occurs because the speaker is positioned as authoritative and empowered, as the knowledgeable subject, while the group in the Third World is reduced, merely because of the structure of the speaking practice, to an object and victim that must be championed from afar. Though the speaker may be trying to materially improve the situation of some lesser-privileged group, one of the effects of her discourse is to reenforce racist, imperialist conceptions and perhaps also to further silence the lesser-privileged group's own ability to speak and be heard.18 This shows us why it is so important to reconceptualize discourse, as Foucault recommends, as an event, which includes speaker, words, hearers, location, language, and so on. All such evaluations produced in this way will be of necessity indexed. That is, they will obtain for a very specific location and cannot be taken as universal. This simply follows from the fact that the evaluations will be based on the specific elements of historical discursive context, location of speakers and hearers, and so forth. When any of these elements is changed, a new evaluation is called for. Our ability to assess the effects of a given discursive event is limited; our ability to predict these effects is even more difficult. When meaning is plural and deferred, we can never hope to know the totality of effects. Still, we can know some of the effects our speech generates: I can find out, for example, that the people I spoke for are angry that I did so or appreciative. By learning as much as possible about the context of reception I can increase my ability to discern at least some of the possible effects. This mandates incorporating a more dialogic approach to speaking, that would include learning from and about the domains of discourse my words will affect. I want to illustrate the implications of this fourth point by applying it to the examples I gave at the beginning. In the case of Anne Cameron, if the effects of her books are truly disempowering for Native women, they are counterproductive to Cameron's own stated intentions, and she should indeed "move over." In the case of the white male theorist who discussed architecture instead of the politics of postmodernism, the effect of his refusal was that he offered no contribution to an important issue and all of us there lost an opportunity to discuss and explore it. Now let me turn to the example of George Bush. When Bush claimed that Noriega is a corrupt dictator who stands in the way of democracy in Panama, he repeated a claim which has been made almost word for word by the Opposition movement in Panama. Yet the effects of the two statements are vastly different because the meaning of the claim changes radically depending on who states it. When the president of the United States stands before the world passing judgement on a Third World government, and criticizing it on the basis of corruption and a lack of democracy, the immediate effect of this statement, as opposed to the Opposition's, is to reenforce the prominent Anglo view that Latin American corruption is the primary cause of the region's poverty and lack of democracy, that the U.S. is on the side of democracy in the region, and that the U.S. opposes corruption and tyranny. Thus, the effect of a U.S. president's speaking for Latin America in this way is to re-consolidate U.S. imperialism by obscuring its true role in the region in torturing and murdering hundreds and thousands of people who have tried to bring democratic and progressive governments into existence. And this effect will continue until the U.S. government admits its history of international mass murder and radically alters it foreign policy. IV. Conclusion This issue is complicated by the variable way in which the importance of the source, or location of the author, can be understood, a topic alluded to earlier. On one view, the author of a text is its "owner" and "originator" credited with creating its ideas and with being their authoritative interpreter. On another view, the original speaker or writer is no more privileged than any other person who articulates these views, and in fact the "author" cannot be identified in a strict sense because the concept of author is an ideological construction many abstractions removed from the way in which ideas emerge and become material forces.19 Now, does this latter position mean that the source or locatedness of the author is irrelevant? It need not entail this conclusion, though it might in some formulations. We can de-privilege the "original" author and reconceptualize ideas as traversing (almost) freely in a discursive space, available from many locations, and without a clearly identifiable originary track, and yet retain our sense that source remains relevant to effect. Our meta-theory of authorship does not preclude the material reality that in discursive spaces there is a speaker or writer credited as the author of her utterances, or that for example the feminist appropriation of the concept "patriarchy" gets tied to Kate Millett, a white Anglo feminist, or that the term feminism itself has been and is associated with a Western origin. These associations have an effect, an effect of producing distrust on the part of some Third World nationalists, an effect of reinscribing semi-conscious imperialist attitudes on the part of some first world feminists. These are not the only possible effects, and some of the effects may not be pernicious, but all the effects must be taken into account when evaluating the discourse of "patriarchy." The emphasis on effects should not imply, therefore, that an examination of the speaker's location is any less crucial. This latter examination might be called a kind of genealogy. In this sense, a genealogy involves asking how a position or view is mediated and constituted through and within the conjunction and conflict of historical, cultural, economic, psychological, and sexual practices. But it seems to me that the importance of the source of a view, and the importance of doing a

genealogy, should be subsumed within an overall analysis of effects, making the central question what the effects are of the view on material and discursive practices through which it traverses and the particular configuration of power relations emergent from these. Source is relevant only to the extent that it has an impact on effect. As Gayatri Spivak likes to say, the invention of the telephone by a European upper class male in no way preempts its being put to the use of an anti-imperialist revolution. In conclusion, I would stress that the practice of speaking for others is often born of a desire for mastery, to privilege oneself as the one who more correctly understands the truth about another's situation or as one who can champion a just cause and thus achieve glory and praise. And the effect of the practice of speaking for others is often, though not always, erasure and a reinscription of sexual, national, and other kinds of hierarchies. I hope that this analysis will contribute toward rather than diminish the important discussion going on today about how to develop strategies for a more equitable, just distribution of the ability to speak and be heard. But this development should not be taken as an absolute dis-authorization of all practices of speaking for. It is not always the case that when others unlike me speak for me I have ended up worse off, or that when we speak for others they end up worse off. Sometimes, as Loyce Stewart has argued, we do need a "messenger" to advocate for our needs. The source of a claim or discursive practice in suspect motives or maneuvers or in privileged social locations, I have argued, though it is always relevant, cannot be sufficient to repudiate it. We must ask further questions about its effects, questions which amount to the following: will it enable the empowerment of oppressed peoples?

Embrace a politics of listening—this allows everyone in this round to come to grips with their own privilege and meaningfully reform the racial matrix Dreher, 9—professor at University of Technology, Sydney (Tanja, "Eavesdropping with Permission: the Politics of Listening for Safe Speaking Spaces", Borderlands E-Journal, Volume 8 Number 1, www.borderlands.net.au/vol8no1_2009/dreher_eavesdropping.pdf)//twemchen

This paper explores the possibilities and limits of a politics of ‘listening’ as a strategy for a privileged white woman to contribute to antiracism in the face of dominant discourses of gendered protectionism . Reflecting on my own role as a co-convenor of a series of workshops aimed at intervening in discourses and policies of ‘protection’ directed at Indigenous and Muslim women,

I suggest that ‘eavesdropping with permission’ may in some cases contribute to the negotiation of safer speaking spaces. In contrast to ‘dialogue’ aimed at empathy or understanding, ‘eavesdropping with permission’ involves the possibility of shifting risk and redistributing discomfort in order to unsettle the privileges of a centralized speaking position. In this paper I reflect on my role in a series of small workshops focused on the politics of gendered protectionism faced by Indigenous and Muslim women in Australia. My involvement began with a challenge overheard at two events held on the first anniversary of the Cronulla riots, in early December 2006. In very different ways, two conferences held in Sydney at that time ended with some participants interested in creating safe spaces

for potentially difficult conversations between Indigenous people and Muslims in Australian. Here I reflect on my experiences as a co-convenor of the resulting ‘Gender, Violence, Protection’ workshop series in an attempt to analyse some of the possibilities for a white, middle-class woman like myself, influenced by feminisms, antiracism and critical race and whiteness studies, to contribute to developing safer spaces for speaking and listening across differences in the context of Indigenous sovereignty, and despite the persistence of colonial feminism and the privileges of whiteness. Drawing on recent work on the politics of speaking and listening, I suggest

that a particular form of ‘political listening’ (Bickford 1996) or ‘eavesdropping’ (Raftcliffe 2005) may enable people, like myself, who are discursively privileged, to contribute to antiracism without dominating the space of conversation. This eavesdropping entails a shift to the margins and an ongoing negotiation of discomfort and permission. In my analysis I highlight the unease and uncertainty provoked by eavesdropping as a register of shifting hierarchies of safety and risk, and also the impossibility of simply ‘transcending’ networks of privilege and power. What’s a middle class white feminist to do? Given these pitfalls, what is a middle class white woman to do? Is there any role for me in the work of creating safe spaces for new conversations? Scholarship which works across feminism, antiracism, postcolonial and critical race and whiteness studies

offers many provocative suggestions. The tradition of transnational feminism tends to focus on strategies of alliances and intersectional politics, while scholars engaging with whiteness and Indigenous sovereignties emphasise the need to unlearn privilege and give up power. Aileen Moreton-Robinson concludes her analysis of whiteness and Australian feminisms by arguing that, ‘the real challenge for white feminists is to

theorise the relinquishment of power’ (2000: 186). In her analysis of speaking positions, the role of academic research and violence against Indigenous women, Sonia Smallacombe argues that the central challenge is ‘whether feminists and their institutions interrogate their own power base and whether they are willing to move aside to give space for Indigenous women’s voices’ (2004: 51). Fiona Nicoll (2004) reflects on her own experiences as a middle-class

white woman teaching critical race and whiteness studies in Indigenous sovereignties and suggests that this teaching must challenge students to locate ‘their own position within racialised networks of power’ and should ‘shift focus from the racialised oppression of Indigenous Australians to the white middle-class subject position that is a direct product of this oppression’. According to Nicoll, ‘the task of non-Indigenous students and teachers becomes that of observing and beginning to denaturalize the

everyday invasiveness of policies and practices underpinned by patriarchal white sovereignty’ (2004: 6). These are compelling reminders that white women must do their own race work and focus attention on their own privileges and power (see

also Ratcliffe 2005: 5-6). This can be difficult and uncomfortable work, in which good intentions are deeply suspect. Alison Jones (1999) contends that ‘even good intentions by the dominant group are not always sufficient to enable their ears to ‘hear’, and therefore for the other to ‘speak’. Many authors analyse the ways in which racism is perpetuated under

the guise of ‘good intentions’ and Damien Riggs (2004: 9) highlights Jane Haggis’ suggestion that Australian critical race and whiteness studies ‘should not be about making non-Indigenous people ‘comfortable’, but should instead continue to destabilise the assumptions of privilege that inform non-Indigenous belonging’ . My involvement in this project, and the writing of this paper, has been uncomfortable and uncertain. I have experienced levels of panic far greater than my usual nervousness before public speaking — and this anxiety has manifested bodily, in sleeplessness and loss of appetite and nausea and shivering. Mindful of Sara Ahmed’s (2004) analyses of ‘bad feeling’, I reflect on these discomforts as a register of the violent colonial histories and ongoing racisms which form the possibilities for action and change, rather than as markers of an end to or an overcoming of racism. Rather than transcending ‘bad feeling’ the challenge is to work to redistribute risk and discomfort as a means to developing better possibilities for listening and speaking.

2nc Link WallSpeaking about others is indistinguishable from speaking for others—they are representing the Other as they wishAlcoff, 91—Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies and the Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence at Syracuse University (Linda, Winter 1991, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique, No. 20, p. 5-32)//twemchen

But first I need to explain further my framing of the problem. In the examples used above, there may appear to be a conflation between the issue of speaking for others and the issue of speaking about others. This conflation was intentional on my part, because it is difficult to distinguish speaking about from speaking for in all cases. There is an ambiguity in the two phrases: when one is speaking for another one may be describing their situation and thus also speaking about them. In fact, it may be impossible to speak for another without simultaneously conferring information about them. Similarly, when one is speaking about another, or

simply trying to describe their situation or some aspect of it, one may also be speaking in place of them, i.e. speaking for them. One may be speaking about another as an advocate or a messenger if the person cannot speak for herself.

Thus I would maintain that if the practice of speaking for others is problematic, so too must be the practice of speaking about others.8 This is partly the case because of what has been called the "crisis of representation." For in both the

practice of speaking for as well as the practice of speaking about others, I am engaging in the act of representing the other 's needs, goals, situation, and in fact, who they are, based on my own situated interpretation. In post-

structuralist terms, I am participating in the construction of their subject-positions rather than simply discovering their true selves. Once we pose it as a problem of representation, we see that, not only are speaking for and speaking about analytically close, so too are the practices of speaking for others and speaking for myself. For, in speaking for myself, I am also representing my self in a certain way, as occupying a specific subject-position, having certain characteristics and not others, and so on. In speaking for myself, I (momentarily) create my self---just as much as when I speak for others I create them as a public, discursive self, a self which is more unified than any subjective experience can support. And this public self will in most cases have an effect on the self experienced

as interiority. The point here is that the problem of representation underlies all cases of speaking for , whether I am

speaking for myself or for others. This is not to suggest that all representations are fictions: they have very real material effects, as well as material origins, but they are always mediated in complex ways by discourse, power, and location. However, the problem of speaking for others is more specific than the problem of representation generally, and requires its own particular analysis. There is one final point I want to make before we can pursue this analysis. The way I have articulated this problem may imply that individuals make conscious choices about their discursive practice free of ideology and the constraints of material

reality. This is not what I wish to imply. The problem of speaking for others is a social one, the options available to us are

socially constructed, and the practices we engage in cannot be understood as simply the results of autonomous individual choice. Yet to replace both "I" and "we" with a passive voice that erases agency results in an erasure of responsibility and accountability for one's speech, an erasure I would strenuously argue against (there is too little responsibility-taking already in Western practice!). When we sit down to write, or get up to speak, we experience ourselves as making choices. We may experience hesitation from fear of being criticized or from fear of exacerbating a problem we would like to remedy, or we may experience a resolve to speak despite existing obstacles, but in many cases we experience having the possibility to speak or not to speak. On the one hand, a theory which explains this experience as involving autonomous choices free of material structures would be false and ideological, but on the other hand, if we do not acknowledge the activity of choice and the experience of individual doubt, we are denying a reality of our experiential lives.9 So I see the argument of this paper as addressing that small space of discursive agency we all experience, however multi-layered, fictional, and constrained it in fact is.

Even if the Other supposedly wants to be spoken for, it is still an act of representing the Other which ignores the imbalance of power and recreates violenceAlcoff, 91—Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies and the Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence at Syracuse University (Linda, Winter 1991, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique, No. 20, p. 5-32)//twemchen

There is another sense of representation that may seem also vitally connected here: political representation, as in, for example, electoral politics. Elected representatives have a special kind of authorization to speak for their constituents, and one might wonder whether such authorization dissolves the problems associated with speaking for others and therefore should perhaps serve as a model solution for the problem. I would answer both yes and no. Elected representatives do have a kind of authorization to speak for others, and we may even expand this to include less formal instances in which someone is authorized by the person(s) spoken for to speak on their behalf. There are many examples of this sort of authorizing, such as when I asked my partner to speak on my behalf in the hospital delivery room, or when my student authorized me to speak on her behalf in a meeting with the chancellor. However, the procurement of such authorization does not render null and void all attendant problems with speaking for others. One is still interpreting the other's situation and wishes (unless perhaps one simply reads a written text they have supplied), and so one is still creating for them a self in the presence of others. Moreover, the power to confer such authorization, and to have power over the designated representative, is rarely present in the instances where one is being spoken for. Intellectual work has certainly not been guided by the mandate to get permission from those whom one is speaking for and about, and it is safe to say that most political representatives have not been strictly guided by the need to get such authorization either. The point here is that the model of political representation cannot be used in all instances of speaking for others, though it may prove instructive when we attempt to formulate responses to the problem.

A2 – PermutationA historical and social analysis of the development and usages of language is a starting point to the 1AC—or else the AFF can never successfully combat Islamophobia and its effects on individualsMarino, 5—philosophy professor at Macalester University (Lauren, 5/1/5, "Speaking for Others", Macalester Journal of Philosophy, Volume 14, Issue 1, Article 4, digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1016&context=philo)//twemchen

Speaker location is a recent yet important discussion in the philosophy of language. It was suggested by Linda

Alcoff in her article “The Problem of Speaking for Others” that a speaker’s location affects not only the meaning but also the truth of what is said.1 With this in mind, there are two problems with speaking for other people that need to

be resolved. The first is the relation of language to the self, and the access we have to the experience of others. The second is the political dimension that determines the effective and appropriate situations for speaking for others. I will argue that the self is constituted through language games and as such, when we speak for others we must be careful not to remove agency from the other, and force upon them our definition of who they are. I will argue that bell hooks’ argument for the oppressed to create new language games through organic

intellectuals is the best struggle in which the oppressed can engage. To determine the relationship between language and the self is to determine how language gains meaning . This is a strange endeavor to the nonphilosopher. Lay people don’t need to question why others comprehend what they say. They are understood and understand others as well. To ask what they mean by their language is a superfluous investigation. Why? Because language hasn’t failed yet. Words seem so organic that it is often difficult to step back and try to understand how they work. A theory of meaning is not necessary for words to work. Yet philosophy does 1 Alcoff, Linda. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique (Winter): 5-32. 1991 36 search for such a system. The danger is that philosophy will muddle a perfectly functional system. The initial understanding of language is implied in the philosophy of Descartes. Descartes views the mind as a private place. The mind has thoughts that it conveys to the world through language. I have a thought inside my private mind which I then translate into language. Words stand in for these private ideas, ideas to which only the speaker has access. The outside world cannot know my

mind except through the language I use to describe it. Language therefore gains meaning directly from the Cartesian mind. Wittgenstein

offers a different understanding of language and the self. He rejects the idea that language could gain meaning from a private objects in the mind of a speaker. He believes that language gains meaning through public use in a community of speakers . The classic example of this is Wittgenstein’s king piece on a chessboard. To teach someone what a king is, we can point to a king and say, “This is a king,” but she doesn’t actually understand what the piece is until she understands the use of the piece

in the game. The game metaphor is extended to language. As in a game, the use of language must be rule guided . In order to communicate with each other, we need to understand the rules of communication . The rules of chess make the game and define a use for the term “king.” When we understand the rules, we are initiated and can play chess ourselves.

Language functions in the same way. There are multiple language games, each with their own context and rules of use. The rules of use are specific to each game. Like games, language games are created and die; they evolve until we have no use for them. There are multiple language games, each specific to their form. As a result, for

Wittgenstein, there can be no private language that refers to objects accessible to the 37 speaker alone. In order to participate in a language game I have to be familiar with rules. I learn rules through socialization, because my community teaches me the rules. Just as I learned to play gin rummy by my family teaching the rules to me, my family also taught me how to use words in different language games. I was taught that the word believe in the sentence “I believe in God,” was used differently

then in the sentence “I believe you.” I was initiated into the language games of religion and trust. But the rules I learned were contingent on my community. Correct usage was determined by the community’s understanding of the rules. Understanding this correct usage is being initiated into the language game. As in regular games, I cannot play a language game when I do not know the rules. When I went to play gin rummy at a friend’s house, I lost a hundred points for holding the queen of spades at the end of a hand. An alien rule to me, I was upset that I lost, and from my perspective unfairly. We were playing two different games, because the rules were different. Language works the same way. The sentence “I believe in God,” means something different to a Catholic than to a Protestant. To understand the rules, we have to be initiated. Private language cannot determine meaning in the manner Wittgenstein describes and others

cannot be initiated into a private language. The objects, the thoughts of a Cartesian mind, are in an exclusive space that others cannot enter. As such we have an epistemological privilege where our own minds are concerned. Whatever seems to be the case is the case. Because we individually determine the use of a private language, there is no way we can be wrong. If everything is in accordance with a rule, it is doubtful we have a rule at all. In fact, not only do we not have a rule but the

language would be meaningless even for 38 the person whose language it is. Without a rule following, no public consensus can be reached. Without a rule, a word can have no regular use and hence no meaning. Language is used to make connections between individuals and this requires that we follow rules . Wittgenstein writes that

"If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also

(queer as this may sound) in judgments." 2 To base a language game on something the individual has exclusive access to, is a failing language game. It cannot use language because, “the individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.”3

Meaning is lost. Private language cannot follow public rules and cannot produce meaning. The concept of a self within this framework shifts from Descartes self inside a private mind, to a self that is public, constituted within language games and the self becomes contingent. Each person is familiar with her own set of language games. While each person may have a unique combination of language games, none of the

language games within the set is unique to that individual alone. There is no private self, within this understanding of language. Rather our experience is constituted through a public language. Therefore the self is not an isolated private mind, but rather the self is constituted by language games. Richard Rorty argues that a self constituted by language games is itself contingent, because if I change my languages games I change myself. This also means that selves cannot exist outside of language because 2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Englewood, NJ: Prentice Hall. 1958 (#242) 3 Ibid. (#243) 39 language comprises the self. In

this interpretation, a private Cartesian self is nonsensical. The experience of oppression is usually perceived to be a private language. Only an individual knows how she is oppressed and how it affects her. The problem is that because no one else has access to my mind, whatever seems to be the case is the case .

Discourse comes first—Interrogation of metaphors challenges the root of oppressive policymaking discourses, and comes prior to creating social changeO’Brien, 9—associate professor at Southern Illinois University (Gerald V., Winter 2009, “Metaphors and the pejorative framing of marginalized groups: implications for social work education,” Journal of Social Work Education, 45.1, pg. 29-47, Gale Onefile)//twemchen

Rather than arguing about whether there are any bases in fact that undergird such presentations, we should consider such statements in their proper light, as propagandistic efforts to control the identity of a group of individuals for purposes of power augmentation by an opposition group and to foster their policymaking hegemony. Policy, as I attest in this article,

begins with the attempt by stakeholders to control, manage, and wield words, images, and stories to present a desired means of imagining a social problem or community subgroup. Social workers who are unaware of this aspect of policy or who dismiss it as having minor importance put themselves at an extreme disadvantage in their efforts to have measurable positive impacts on the development of social policy within the context of a national landscape that increasingly favors style over substance . Although a number of social work and related

writings have described the potential importance of metaphor analysis within the profession, few of these works touch on policy considerations. Normally, metaphor is discussed as a useful tool for micro- or mezzolevel intervention. Articles by Adams (1997) and Lyddon, Clay, and Sparks (2001), for example, provided examples of metaphors as a means of providing clients with increased awareness of their issues, as an unusual but potentially fruitful means of soliciting difficult information from clients, or, as Lyddon and his coauthors noted, for "introducing new frames of reference" (p. 269) from which clients can consider their issues or goals. Goldstein (1999) described root metaphors as basic truths about the world as social workers see it that informs their interactions with clients, and Duffy (2001) described various means of using metaphors as a form of group work. Educators in social policy should find ways to incorporate metaphor components within their syllabi and could even require students to include sections in policy papers on the perceptual images and media and stakeholder framings of specific client groups. Students need to understand that specific policies are developed with an image of the client or client group in mind. Different policies, even related to the same social problem, relate largely to differing images of the recipient class. As alluded to

above, denigrating stereotypes often have an extremely long "shelf life" because the metaphors that are

intrinsically related to those stereotypes become cultural images . Moreover, as noted above, these images are often

transplanted from one out-group to another across time. As the importance and science of political

rhetoric, including metaphors, have evolved, the image-making industry has boomed. This has, it should be mentioned,

been pushed along by the vast expansion of new modes of information , especially over the Internet (e.g., blogs and Web

sites such as YouTube). Because of the need to set forth the image that what they do is something other than manipulation of the public, these individuals normally present themselves in a more acceptable guise . A plethora of

media consultants, legislative aides, think-tank staff, industrial and corporate public relations specialists, and other individuals

spend a great deal of time and effort attempting to fashion and spread their preferred vision of the political landscape in ways that are both easily digestible for the general public and highly profitable for their employers or careers. Because policy analysis is impossible without considering important stakeholder groups, social work students need to see these individuals as strategic players in the political arena. It may do little good for social workers to become heavily involved further down the policy road (e.g., attempting to assist with the development, implementation, evaluation, and revision of policies) if the basic framing of issues and groups is left to others, because this framing forms the foundation onto which a policy structure is created.

Your first question should be the way that language is used – it’s the most concrete, immediate way to target and challenge oppression Collins and Glover 2 (John Collins, Ass. Prof. of Global Studies at St. Lawrence, and Ross Glover, Visiting Professor of Sociology at St. Lawrence University, 2002, Collateral Language, p. 6-7, The Real Effects of Language)

As any university student knows, theories about the “social construction” and social effects of language have become a common feature of

academic scholarship. Conservative critics often argue that those who use these theories of language (e.g.,

deconstruction) are “just” talking about language, as opposed to talking about the “real world.” The essays in this book,

by contrast, begin from the premise that language matters in the most concrete , im mediate way possible: its use, by political and military leaders, leads directly to violence in the form of war, mass murder (in cluding genocide), the physical destruction of human commu nities, and the devastation of the natural environment. Indeed, if the world ever witnesses a nuclear holocaust, it will probably be because leaders in

more than one country have succeeded in convincing their people , through the use of political language, that the use of nuclear weapons and, if necessary, the destruction of the earth itself, is justifiable . From our

perspective, then, every act of political violence—from the horrors perpetrated against Native Americans to the murder of political

dissidents in the Soviet Union to the destruction of the World Trade Center, and now the bombing of Afghanistan—is intimately linked with the use of language . Partly what we are talking about here, of course, are the processes of “manufacturing consent” and shaping people’s per ception of the world around them ; people are more likely to sup port acts of violence committed in their name if the recipients of the violence have been defined as “terrorists,” or if the violence is presented as a defense of “freedom.” Media analysts such as Noam Chomsky have written eloquently about the corrosive effects that this kind of process has on the political culture of supposedly democratic societies. At the

risk of stating the obvious, however, the most fundamental effects of violence are those that are visited upon the objects of violence; the language that shapes public opinion is the same language that burns villages, besieges entire populations, kills and maims human bodies, and leaves the ground scarred with bomb craters and littered with land mines. As George Orwell so famously illustrated in his work, acts of vio lence can easily be made more palatable through the use of eu phemisms such as “pacification” or, to use an example discussed in this book, “targets.”

It is important to point out, however, that the need for such language derives from the simple fact that the violence itself is abhorrent. Were it not for the abstract language of “vital interests” and “surgical strikes” and the flattering lan - guage of “civilization” and ‘just” wars, we would be less likely to avert our mental gaze from the physical effects of violence.

A2 – Solvency DeficitsThe alternative does not necessarily reject the elite’s ability to speak—rather, an analysis of our discourse can create organic intellectuals that creates a counter-language to bridge the oppressed and the oppresorsMarino, 5—philosophy professor at Macalester University (Lauren, 5/1/5, "Speaking for Others", Macalester Journal of Philosophy, Volume 14, Issue 1, Article 4, digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1016&context=philo)//twemchen

The margin must produce organic intellectuals . It might be thought that these organic intellectuals should translate between

language games. But as hooks points out, using “the oppressor’s language” is not adequate because it cannot articulate the experience of the oppressed. Yet, it is the only language game the oppressing can play.

Organic intellectuals affect the center from the margins if they are able to incorporate multiple voices in the texts they

create. The goal of the organic intellectual according to hooks is to “identify the spaces where we begin a process of revision” to create a counter-ideology. 8 Hooks relates this agency to language. “Language is also a place of struggle.”9 The counterculture can produce a counter-language, which is able to produce a new language to mediate between the margins and the center. Necessarily the new game must include portions of both old language games or no one will understand it. It must use old understandings to create 7 Gramsci, Antonio. The Prison Notebooks. The Intellectuals. New York: International Publishers. 1971 p.3-23 8 hooks, bell. “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” Yearning:

Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Between the Lines. 1990. 9 Ibid. 45 new meanings. These counter-languages can function as the intermediary language games that the oppressed and the elites can be initiated simultaneously. A new language game must be created. A good example of this is Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. He used concepts of freedom and democracy familiar to the center to explain the experience of the oppressed within in the mainstream language game, as well as created new metaphors and linguistic form, i.e. the preacher’s sermon, to bring the voice of the oppressed and the oppressors into a realm of communication. (bell hooks uses the preachers sermon form in her refrain ‘language is also a place of struggle’). 10 One famous metaphor is freedom as a bounced check to African Americans. This created a new understanding of the situation. It worked between the language of oppression understood by African Americans and the center’s understanding of freedom and the promises of democracy. King was able to include multiple voices, building a bridge between the margin and the center. The conclusion of hooks is that the margin can be more than a

place of oppression and alienation. It can be “a site of radical possibility, a space of resistance,” that is not open to those in the center. It is the space to produce counter-hegemonic culture that the organic intellectual is looking for. The oppressed can retell their story, and if we accept Rorty’s argument that the self is contingent, the oppressed create themselves in the process . To speak for the oppressed is to silence them . Moreover, in their absence of voice, we define them . We can define them in many ways, but they will always be a “they” and not an “us.” They will be the other. We must have faith in the margins to produce new language games to communicate with us.

The alternative is to analyze and recognize the disparities that exist between the oppressed and the oppressors—only by allowing the oppressed to talk for themselves can we fully understand IslamophobiaMarino, 5—philosophy professor at Macalester University (Lauren, 5/1/5, "Speaking for Others", Macalester Journal of Philosophy, Volume 14, Issue 1, Article 4, digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1016&context=philo)//twemchen

As far as my thoughts are concerned, my use of language to describe my internal feelings is the only language that can be used to describe them, and the distinction between correct and incorrect rule following collapses. This is not to say we should doubt a person when she says she feels oppressed. Rather, Wittgenstein

believes this form of skepticism is embedded in a Cartesian understanding of the mind. When I speak, I play a language game that no one has been initiated

into. I define meaning. This is suspect foundation for a language game, because language is not a private activity. We use language to make connections between individuals. The problem is that oppression takes the form of oppression of

individuals. For example, torture is not a common experience within a community. The experience does not gain voice within a community because it is not an experience that others will share. Hence, no language can be developed to speak about it. However, there is hope within Wittgenstein’s arguments if we apply a new political dimension with Rorty and Alcoff. These views of language implicate the philosophical relationship between language and the self. The Cartesian sense of self means that only I can accurately speak for myself, because my thoughts are in a private space no one else can enter. It is not created by speaking, but rather

it simply exists as a stable entity. This extends to the problem of speaking for others, because only an oppressed group knows how they are oppressed and how it affects them . The problem is that 40 because no one else outside the group has access to their subjective state of oppression. The language they may use to express it functions as a private language to the rest of society . All specific language games functions this way. However, the language game the oppressed use to express their oppression is one that necessarily needs to transcend its community to spur change. But, no one but the oppressed can play it, and therefore no outside connection can be made. It cannot produce public meaning. However, if language gains meaning from use, then access to the private

objects of the oppressed group’s language game is not hopeless. There is no longer a private self but only the public self. We, including the oppressed, become our descriptions of ourselves. Groups can fall into dominant language games and descriptions, but in doing so we allow others to define who we are. We must determine what is true of and for ourselves. I conclude with Rorty that: It was Nietzche who…suggested that we drop the idea of “knowing the truth.”…He hope that once we realized that Plato’s “true world” was just a fable, we would seek consolation…in being that peculiar sort of dying animal who, by describing himself in his own terms, had created himself. More

exactly, he would have created the only part of himself that mattered by constructing his own mind. To create one’s mind is to create one’s own language…4 There is no privileged truth but rather truth is relative to our adopted language games. Truth becomes not objective Truth, but something

that is agreed upon; it is contingent. 4 Rorty, Richard. Contigency, Irony and Solidarity. Boston: Cambridge University Press. 1989 41 This brings us to the political issue. The intuitive response is to do everything possible to allow the oppressed to speak for themselves. This is not always possible. But, if language constitutes the self, then who can speak for the oppressed and how can she do so? Alcoff’s understanding of speaking for others is a good starting point. 5 Her general argument is that the location of the speaker affects the meaning and truth of what is said. Moreover, the location of the speaker affects the speech itself. Language is a creative activity and what we create is contingent on where we are located within society. Alcoff’s arguments can be added to Rorty’s interpretation of the self. When we speak we are not only creating new truth relative to the

language games we employ, but we create ourselves. Hooks uses this idea of selves to create a political program for oppressed groups. She extends the metaphor of language as a game. If language is a game then it has elements of competition and power, and even playfulness. These elements can be used to make a speech for others a speech to their advantage, but with a few caveats. The first is that we initially resist the urge to speak for others and listen to them. This ideally allows the speaker to share agency with the oppressed by including them in the creative process. Secondly, we must account for our location and context when we speak. President

Bush’s analysis of Iraq is very different from that of an Iraqi. Each should account for the way their location affects his speech. Third, the speaker must be responsible for her own speech. Speaking on behalf of someone else doesn’t enable the speaker to speak without thought. Finally, the speaker must attempt to take account of the affects of the speech. Ultimately, we must recognize that speaking and silence are always a political decision. We must use our voice consciously. If the self is located within language games the there is a commonality between those who share language games. This removes some of the barriers between selves and I do have access to the experience of those with whom I share language games. Sharing language games means sharing experience. I am able to speak for those who language games I play. There are some problems with this understanding. Alcoff thinks membership in a group is not precise or determinate. It is unclear which groups I could belong to and which of those groups I should single out to

affiliate myself. More importantly, membership in a group doesn’t necessarily mean an authority to speak for the whole group. However, if we accept that the self is constituted within language, then those who share language games with me have direct access to my experience in away that no one can ever have access to a Cartesian mind. We do not need to ask for absolute identity, language and experience between speakers but just a commonality. Furthermore, Bernstein argues that we cannot speak without speaking for other people. 6 The speaker’s location is necessarily a location in relation to other people. The relationship cannot be removed, and we cannot avoid it. Speaking at all makes speaking for others inevitable. We return to the intuitive response to the struggle of oppressed groups: have the group speak for itself. Speaking becomes a type of agency in which I construct myself because contrary to a Cartesian self, selves do not exist prior to or separate from language. To lose my speech is to lose myself. The oppressed have the ability to

communicate with each other and through their language game they are able to discuss 6 Bernstein, Susan. 43 their struggle with one another. Sharing languages games enables the oppressed to a specific, limited dimension of power. Their language game will always fail to communicate their struggle to those who have not been initiated into it. They have

direct access to the experience of oppression and their agency, but they can only reach their own group. Those on the margin cannot reach those in the center . On the other hand, those in the center, the elites, share a language that can reach the majority of society. It is a language game they are familiar with and can use adeptly. However, they do not have the experience with or access to the language game of the oppressed. They have the power to use their language but nothing to say. The catch-22 is the choice between a group who embodies the agency and the dimensions of political struggle against oppression without a way to communicate it to the larger community, and a group with the language to reach society but is ignorant of the political struggle. There lies a need for a synergy between the experience of the oppressed on the margins and the language game of those in the center. The synergy requires a speaker who comes from the oppressed but has knowledge of the language game of the center. Such a person could incorporate the experience of the oppressed into a new language game that could be accessed by those in power. The concern is what is lost and sacrificed in translation.

A2 – Can’t Speak<read the block answer to “our speech act good”—they all apply>

The 1AC speech act is a tautological form of silencing—it stops the oppressed people to speak for themselves while speaking for them for personal goalsAlcoff, 91—Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies and the Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence at Syracuse University (Linda, Winter 1991, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique, No. 20, p. 5-32)//twemchen

So it might be argued that the retreat from speaking for others can be maintained without sacrificing political effectivity if it is restricted

to particular discursive spaces. Neither Premise (1) nor Premise (2) entail reductionism or essentialism. They argue for the relevance of location, not its singular power of determination , and they are non-committal on how to construe the metaphysics of location. While the "Charge of Reductionism" response has been popular among academic theorists,

what I call the "Retreat" response has been popular among some sections of the U.S. feminist movement. This response is simply to retreat from all practices of speaking for; it asserts that one can only know one's own narrow individual experience and one's "own truth" and thus that one can never make claims beyond this. This response is motivated in part by the desire to recognize difference and different priorities, without organizing these differences into hierarchies. Now, sometimes I think this is the

proper response to the problem of speaking for others, depending on who is making it. We certainly want to encourage a more receptive listening on the part of the discursively privileged and to discourage presumptuous and oppressive practices of speaking for . And the desire to retreat sometimes results from the desire to engage in political work but without practicing what might be called discursive imperialism. But a retreat from speaking for will not result in an increase in receptive listening in all cases; it may result merely in a retreat into a narcissistic yuppie lifestyle in which a privileged person takes no responsibility for her society whatsoever. She may even feel justified in exploiting her privileged capacity for personal happiness at the expense of others on the grounds that she has no alternative. The major problem with such a retreat is that it significantly undercuts the possibility of political effectivity. There are numerous examples of the practice of speaking for others which have been politically efficacious in advancing the needs of those spoken for, from Rigoberta Menchu to Edward Said and Steven Biko. Menchu's efforts to speak for the 33 Indian communities facing genocide in Guatemala have helped to raise money for the revolution and bring pressure against the Guatemalan and U.S. governments who have

committed the massacres in collusion. The point is not that for some speakers the danger of speaking for others does not arise, but that in some cases certain political effects can be garnered in no other way . Joyce Trebilcot's version of the retreat response, which I mentioned at the outset of this essay, raises other issues. She agrees that an absolute prohibition of speaking for would undermine political effectiveness, and therefore says that she will avoid speaking for others only within her

lesbian feminist community. So it might be argued that the retreat from speaking for others can be maintained without sacrificing political effectivity if it is restricted to particular discursive spaces. Why might one advocate such a partial retreat? Given that interpretations and meanings are discursive constructions made by embodied speakers, Trebilcot worries that

attempting to persuade or speak for another will cut off that person's ability or willingness to engage in the constructive act of developing meaning. Since no embodied speaker can produce more than a partial account, and since the process of producing meaning is necessarily collective, everyone's account within a specified community needs to be encouraged. I agree with a great deal of Trebilcot's argument. I certainly agree that in some instances speaking for others constitutes a violence and should be stopped

A2 – On Behalf Of…A speech for the oppressed is to re-create their silence and force them to conform to our expectations and definitionsMarino, 5—philosophy professor at Macalester University (Lauren, 5/1/5, "Speaking for Others", Macalester Journal of Philosophy, Volume 14, Issue 1, Article 4, digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1016&context=philo)//twemchen

If the language games are so disparate that initiation in one, offers no insight into the rules of the other, than there is doubt that translation can be done at all. If translation cannot be done, the best to be hoped for is cooption forcing the margins into the mainstream. What then is the

solution? I agree with bell hooks that the oppressed must celebrate their position on the margins . The oppressed must produce intellectuals so that the dominated can speak to the dominating. The idea goes back to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual. 7 The elites are indoctrinated in the ruling ideology and have an investment in the current order.

No matter how progressive their politics may be, the elite will always be the elite . Their investment in the current social order precludes offers of true systemic change. Gramsci writes of the need for the working class to

develop its own intellectuals who are organically tied to their class. This argument is similar to hooks’ argument. The margin must produce organic intellectuals . It might be thought that these organic intellectuals should translate between language games. But as

hooks points out, using “the oppressor’s language” is not adequate because it cannot articulate the experience of the oppressed. Yet, it is the only language game the oppressing can play. Organic intellectuals affect the center from the margins if they are able to incorporate multiple voices in the texts they create. The goal of the organic intellectual according to hooks is to “identify the spaces where we begin a process of revision” to create a counter-ideology. 8 Hooks relates this agency to language. “Language is also a place of struggle.”9 The counterculture can produce a counter-language, which is able to produce a new language to mediate between the margins and the center. Necessarily the new game must include portions of both old language games or no one will understand it. It must use old understandings to create 7 Gramsci, Antonio. The Prison Notebooks. The Intellectuals. New York: International Publishers. 1971 p.3-23 8 hooks, bell. “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Between the Lines. 1990. 9 Ibid. 45 new meanings. These counter-languages can function as the intermediary language games that the oppressed and the elites can be initiated simultaneously. A new language game must be created. A good example of this is Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. He used concepts of freedom and democracy familiar to the center to explain the experience of the oppressed within in the mainstream language game, as well as created new metaphors and linguistic form, i.e. the preacher’s sermon, to bring the voice of the oppressed and the oppressors into a realm of communication. (bell hooks uses the preachers sermon form in her refrain ‘language is also a place of struggle’). 10 One famous metaphor is freedom as a bounced check to African Americans. This created a new understanding of the situation. It worked between the language of oppression understood by African Americans and the center’s understanding of freedom and the promises of democracy. King was able to include multiple voices, building a bridge between the margin and the center. The conclusion of hooks is that the margin can be more

than a place of oppression and alienation. It can be “a site of radical possibility, a space of resistance,” that is not open to those in the center. It is the space to produce counter-hegemonic culture that the organic intellectual is looking for. The oppressed can retell their story, and if we accept Rorty’s argument that the self is contingent, the oppressed create themselves in the process . To speak for the oppressed is to silence them . Moreover, in their absence of voice, we define them . We can define them in many ways, but they will always be a “they” and not an “us.” They will be the other. We must have faith in the margins to produce new language games to communicate with us.

The alternative is not a blanket rejection of the stories of the Other—but our links outline why their speech act is bad

Alcoff, 91—Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies and the Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence at Syracuse University (Linda, Winter 1991, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique, No. 20, p. 5-32)//twemchen

III. In rejecting a general retreat from speaking for, I am not advocating a return to an unself-conscious appropriation of the other, but rather that anyone who speaks for others should only do so out of a concrete analysis of the particular power relations and discursive effects involved. I want to develop this

point by elucidating four sets of interrogatory practices which are meant to help evaluate possible and actual instances of speaking for. In list form they may appear to resemble an algorithm, as if we could plug in an instance of speaking for and factor out an analysis and evaluation. However, they are meant only to suggest the questions that should be asked concerning any such discursive practice. These are by no means original: they have been learned and practiced by many activists and theorists.

Their intentions are irrelevant—their speech from a social location of privilege and knowledge imposes silence and racism on the silent Muslim Americans who have suffered from racial surveillance

Alcoff, 91—Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies and the Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence at Syracuse University (Linda, Winter 1991, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique, No. 20, p. 5-32)//twemchen

(1) The impetus to speak must be carefully analyzed and, in many cases (certainly for academics!), fought against.

This may seem an odd way to begin discussing how to speak for, but the point is that the impetus to always be the speaker and to speak in all situations must be seen for what it is : a desire for mastery and domination . If one's immediate impulse is to teach rather than listen to a less-privileged speaker, one should resist that impulse long enough to interrogate it carefully. Some of us have been taught that by right of having the dominant gender, class, race, letters after our name, or some other criterion, we are more likely to have the truth. Others have been taught the opposite and will speak haltingly, with apologies, if they speak at all.16 At the same time, we have to acknowledge that the very decision to "move over" or retreat can occur only from a position of privilege. Those who are not in a position of speaking at all cannot retreat from an action they do not employ. Moreover, making the decision for oneself whether or not to retreat is an extension or application of privilege, not an abdication of it. Still, it is sometimes called

for. (2) We must also interrogate the bearing of our location and context on what it is we are saying, and this should be an explicit part of every serious discursive practice we engage in. Constructing hypotheses about the possible connections between our location and our words is one way to begin. This procedure would be most successful if engaged in collectively with others, by which aspects of our location less obvious to us might be revealed.17 One deformed way in which this is too often carried out is when speakers offer up in the spirit of "honesty" autobiographical information about themselves, usually at the beginning of their discourse as a kind of disclaimer. This is meant to acknowledge their own understanding that they are speaking from a specified, embodied location without pretense to a transcendental truth. But as Maria Lugones and others have forcefully argued, such an act serves no good end when it is used as a disclaimer against one's ignorance or errors and is made without critical interrogation of the bearing of such an autobiography on what is about to be said. It leaves for the listeners all the real work that needs to be done. For example, if a middle class white man were to begin a speech by sharing with us this autobiographical information and then using it as a kind of apologetics for any limitations of his speech, this would leave to those of us in the audience who do not share his social location all the work of translating his terms into our own, apprising the applicability of his analysis to our diverse situation, and determining the substantive relevance of his location on his claims. This is simply what less-privileged persons have always had to do for ourselves when reading the history of philosophy, literature, etc., which makes the task of appropriating these discourses more difficult and time-consuming (and alienation more likely to result). Simple unanalyzed disclaimers do not improve on this familiar situation and may even make it worse to the extent

that by offering such information the speaker may feel even more authorized to speak and be accorded more authority by his peers. (3) Speaking should always carry with it an accountability and responsibility for what one says . To whom one is accountable is a

political/epistemological choice contestable, contingent and, as Donna Haraway says, constructed through the process of discursive action. What this entails in practice is a serious commitment to remain open to criticism and to attempt actively, attentively, and sensitively to "hear" the criticism (understand it). A quick impulse to reject criticism must make one wary. (4) Here is

my central point. In order to evaluate attempts to speak for others in particular instances, we need to analyze the probable or actual effects of the words on the discursive and material context. One cannot simply look at the location of the speaker or her credentials to speak; nor can one look merely at the propositional content of the speech; one must also look at where the speech goes and what it does there. Looking merely at the content of a set of claims without looking at their effects cannot produce an adequate or even meaningful evaluation of it, and this is partly because the notion of a content separate from effects does not hold up. The content of the claim, or its meaning, emerges in interaction between words and hearers within a very specific historical situation. Given this, we have to pay careful attention to the discursive arrangement in order to understand the full

meaning of any given discursive event. For example, in a situation where a well-meaning First world person is speaking for a person or group in the Third world, the very discursive arrangement may reinscribe the " hierarchy of civilization s" view where the U. S. lands squarely at the top . This effect occurs because the speaker is positioned as authoritative and empowered, as the knowledgeable subject, while the group in the Third World is reduced , merely because of the structure of the speaking practice, to an object and victim that must be championed from afar. Though the speaker may be trying to materially improve the situation of some lesser-privileged group, one of the effects of her discourse is to reenforce racist, imperialist

conceptions and perhaps also to further silence the lesser-privileged group's own ability to speak and be heard.18 This shows us why it is so important to reconceptualize discourse, as Foucault recommends, as an event, which includes speaker, words, hearers, location, language, and so on. All such evaluations produced in this way will be of necessity indexed. That is, they will obtain for a very specific location and cannot

be taken as universal. This simply follows from the fact that the evaluations will be based on the specific elements of historical discursive context, location of speakers and hearers, and so forth. When any of these elements is changed, a new evaluation is called for. Our ability to assess the effects of a given discursive event is limited; our ability to predict these effects is even more difficult. When meaning is plural and deferred, we can never hope to know the totality of effects. Still, we can know some of the effects our speech generates: I can find out, for example, that the people I spoke for are angry that I did so or

appreciative. By learning as much as possible about the context of reception I can increase my ability to discern at least some of the possible effects. This mandates incorporating a more dialogic approach to speaking, that would include learning from and about the domains of discourse my words will affect. I want to illustrate the implications of this fourth point by applying it to the examples I gave at the beginning. In the case of Anne Cameron, if the effects of her books are truly disempowering for Native women, they are counterproductive to Cameron's own stated intentions, and she should indeed "move over." In the case of the white male theorist who discussed architecture instead of the politics of postmodernism, the effect of his refusal was that he offered no contribution to an important issue and all of us there lost an opportunity to discuss and explore it. Now let me turn to the example of George Bush. When Bush claimed that Noriega is a corrupt dictator who stands in the way of democracy in Panama, he repeated a claim which has been made almost word for word by the Opposition movement in

Panama. Yet the effects of the two statements are vastly different because the meaning of the claim changes radically depending on who states it. When the president of the United States stands before the world passing judgement on a Third World government, and criticizing it on the basis of corruption and a lack of democracy, the immediate effect of this statement, as opposed to the Opposition's, is to reenforce the prominent Anglo view that Latin American corruption is the primary cause of the region's poverty and lack of democracy, that the U.S. is on the side of democracy in the region, and that the U.S. opposes corruption and tyranny. Thus, the effect of a U.S. president's speaking for Latin America in this way is to re-consolidate U.S. imperialism by obscuring its true role in the region in torturing and murdering hundreds and thousands of people who have tried to bring democratic and progressive governments into existence. And this effect will continue until the U.S. government admits its history of international mass murder and radically alters it foreign policy.

Islam K

1nc Islam K The aff’s invocation of “islamophobia” lumps racist government policy with legitimate criticisms of Islam– it’s an academically bankrupt and dangerous epistemology Duss 13 (Matthew Duss. “Denying the Existence of Islamophobia.” January 10, 2013. http://think progress.org/security/2013/01/10/1427861/denying-the-existence-of-islamophobia/)//EMerz

I’m hesitant to wade into a discussion on a book I haven’t yet read, but Jonathan Schanzer’s review of Nathan Lean’s “The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims” in today’s Wall Street Journal makes some pretty big claims about the term “Islamophobia” itself, so I’ll confine my comments to those. “In reality,” Schanzer writes, “Islamophobia is simply a pejorative neologism designed to warn people away from criticizing any aspect of Islam”: Those who deploy it see no difference between Islamism — political Islam and its extremist offshoots — and the religion encompassing some 1.6 billion believers world-wide. Thanks to this feat of conflation, Islamophobia transforms religious doctrines and political ideologies into something akin to race; to be an “Islamophobe” is in some circles today tantamount to being a racist. First, while Schanzer severely overstates it, the problem of conflation is real. I noted this in my critical review of scholar Deepa Kumar’s “Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire,” in which I wrote, “The problem with defining Islamophobia as broadly as Kumar does is that it threatens to divest the term of meaning”: It is possible to condemn terrorism committed by Muslims in the name of religion, or to have serious concerns over the development of pluralistic democracy under Islamist-controlled governments, without being anti-Islam. What defines Islamophobia is the belief that terrorist violence is somehow inherent to Islam, or that democracy is incompatible with correct Islamic practice. In uncovering Islamophobia here, there, and everywhere, Kumar unfortunately gives form to the straw man arguments of actual Islamophobes, who often cry that they are being silenced for voicing any criticism of Muslims. Having said that, Schanzer’s assertion about all of “those who deploy” the term is indefensibly broad. I doubt the Muslims of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, or Temecula, California, or South Arlington, Texas, or of the other American mosques that have endured bigoted attacks in recent years would agree with Schanzer’s blithe dismissal of Islamophobia as “simply a pejorative neologism designed to warn people away from criticizing any aspect of Islam.” Do some use accusations of Islamophobia to stifle legitimate criticism of Islam? Yes, certainly, just as some use accusations of anti-Semitism to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel (as we’ve seen in the recent smear campaign against Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel). But the fact that some use such accusations cynically and recklessly doesn’t mean that Islamophobia and anti-Semitism aren’t real existing problems. As my co-authors and I noted in our 2011 report, “Fear, Inc,” the term Islamophobia shouldn’t be used lightly. We defined it as “an exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative stereotypes resulting in bias, discrimination, and the marginalization and exclusion of Muslims from America’s social, political, and civic life.” We also showed that there is a well-funded network of scholars and activists committed to promoting this fear, hatred, and hostility. People can disagree on how serious or widespread a problem Islamophobia actually is in the U.S. (my own view is that it is now on the wane), but Schanzer’s argument that the whole thing is simply an invention of scheming Islamists and Arab governments is obvious nonsense.

It is an undeniable fact that gender inequality is disproportionately high in Muslim communities—the alternative is to use our position as students from the West to encourage a Muslim ReformationAli, 14—a fellow of the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and founder of the AHA Foundation (Ayaan Hirshi, 4/10/14, “Here’s what I would have said at Brandeis”, The Wallstreet Journal, https://www.aei.org/publication/heres-what-i-would-have-said-at-brandeis/)//tamara&twemchen

On Tuesday, after protests by students, faculty and outside groups, Brandeis University revoked its invitation to Ayaan Hirsi Ali to receive an honorary degree at its

commencement ceremonies in May. The protesters accused Ms. Hirsi Ali, an advocate for the rights of women and girls, of being “Islamophobic.” Here is an abridged version of the remarks she planned to deliver.One year ago, the city and suburbs of Boston were still in mourning. Families who only weeks earlier had children and siblings to hug were left with only photographs and memories. Still others were hovering over bedsides, watching as young men, women, and children endured painful surgeries and permanent disfiguration. All because two brothers, radicalized by jihadist websites, decided to place homemade bombs in backpacks near the finish line of one of the most prominent events in American sports, the Boston Marathon.All of you in the Class of 2014 will never forget that day and the days that followed. You will never forget when you heard the news, where you were, or what you were doing. And when you return here, 10, 15 or 25 years from now, you will be reminded of it. The bombs exploded just 10 miles from this campus.I read an article recently that said many adults don’t remember much from before the age of 8. That means some of your earliest childhood memories may well be of that September morning simply known as “9/11.”You deserve better memories than 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing. And you are not the only ones. In Syria, at least 120,000 people have been killed, not simply in battle, but in wholesale massacres, in a civil war that is increasingly waged across a sectarian divide. Violence is

escalating in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Libya, in Egypt. And far more than was the case when you were born, organized violence in the world today is disproportionately concentrated in the Muslim world.Another striking feature of the countries I have just named,

and of the Middle East generally, is that violence against women is also increasing . In Saudi Arabia, there has been a noticeable rise in the practice of female genital mutilation. In Egypt, 99% of women report being sexually harassed and up to 80 sexual assaults occur in a single day.Especially troubling is the way the status of women as second-class citizens is being cemented in legislation . In Iraq, a law is being proposed that lowers to 9 the legal age at which a girl can be forced into marriage. That same law would give a husband the right to deny his wife permission to leave the house. Sadly, the list could go on . I hope I speak for many when I say that this is not the world that my generation meant to bequeath yours. When you were born, the West was jubilant, having defeated Soviet communism. An international coalition had forced Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. The next mission for American armed forces would be famine relief in my homeland of Somalia. There was no Department of Homeland Security, and few Americans talked about terrorism.Two decades ago, not even the bleakest

pessimist would have anticipated all that has gone wrong in the part of world where I grew up. After so many victories for feminism in the West, no one would have predicted that women’s basic human rights would actually be reduced in so many countries as the 20th century gave way to the 21st .Today, however, I am going to predict a better future, because I believe that the pendulum has swung almost as far as it possibly can in the wrong direction.When I see millions of women in Afghanistan defying threats from the Taliban and lining up to vote; when I see women in Saudi Arabia defying an absurd ban on female driving; and when I see Tunisian women celebrating the conviction of a

group of policemen for a heinous gang rape, I feel more optimistic than I did a few years ago. The misnamed Arab Spring has been a revolution full of

disappointments. But I believe it has created an opportunity for traditional forms of authority—including patriarchal authority—

to be challenged, and even for the religious justifications for the oppression of women to be questioned.Yet for that opportunity to be fulfilled , we in the West must provide the right kind of encouragement. Just as the city of Boston was once the cradle of a new ideal of liberty, we need to return to our roots by becoming once again a beacon of free thought and civility for the 21st century. When there is injustice, we need to speak out, not simply with condemnation, but with concrete actions .One of the best places to do that is in our institutions of higher learning. We need to make our universities temples not of dogmatic orthodoxy, but of truly critical thinking, where all ideas are welcome and where civil debate is encouraged. I’m used to being shouted down on campuses, so I am grateful for the opportunity to address you today. I do not expect all of

you to agree with me, but I very much appreciate your willingness to listen.I stand before you as someone who is fighting for women’s and girls’ basic rights globally. And I stand before you as someone who is not afraid to ask difficult questions about the role of religion in that fight.The connection between violence, particularly violence against women, and Islam is too clear to be ignored . We do no favors to students, faculty, nonbelievers and people of faith when we shut our eyes to this link, when we excuse rather than reflect. So I ask: Is the concept of holy war compatible with our ideal of religious toleration? Is it blasphemy—punishable by death—to question the

applicability of certain seventh-century doctrines to our own era? Both Christianity and Judaism have had their eras of reform. I would argue that the time has come for a Muslim Reformation.Is such an argument inadmissible? It surely should not be at a university that was founded in the wake of the Holocaust, at a time when many American universities still imposed quotas on Jews.The motto of Brandeis University is “Truth even unto its innermost parts.”

That is my motto too. For it is only through truth, unsparing truth, that your generation can hope to do better than mine in the struggle for peace, freedom and equality of the sexes.

Failure to interrogate sexual difference guarantees extinction and genocide Irigaray, 91 (Luce, Famous french scholar, The irigaray Reader, p.33)

Even a vaguely rigorous analysis of claims to equality shows that they are justified at the level of a superficial critique of culture, and Utopian as a means to women's liberation . The exploitation of women is based upon sexual difference, and can only be resolved through sexual difference . Certain tendencies of the day, certain contemporary feminists, are noisily demanding the neutralization of sex [sexe]. That neutralization, if it were possible, would correspond to the end of the human race . The human race is divided into two genres which ensure its production and reproduction. Trying to suppress sexual differ - ence is to invite a genocide more radical than any destruction that has ever existed in History . What is important, on the other hand, is defining the values of belonging to a sex-specific genre. What is indispensable is elaborating a culture of the sexual which does not yet exist, whilst respecting both genres. Because of the historical time gaps between the gynocratic, matriarchal, patriarchal and phallocratic eras, we are in a sexual position which is bound up with generation and not with genre as sex. This means that, within the family, women must be mothers and men must be fathers, but that we have no positive and ethical values that allow two sexes of the same generation to form a creative, and not simply procreative, human couple. One of the major obstacles to the creation and recognition of such values is the more or less covert hold patriarchal and phallocratic roles have had on the whole of our civilization for centuries. It is social justice, pure and simple, to balance out the power of one sex over the other by giving, or restoring, cultural values to female sexuality. What is at stake is clearer today than it was when The Second Sex was written.

Their refusal to integreate the perspective of Muslim women is another example of silencing—the alternative eavesdrops with permission—it uses our privileged positions as students to open discussion on the everyday experiences of these womenDreher, 9—professor at University of Technology, Sydney (Tanja, "Eavesdropping with Permission: the Politics of Listening for Safe Speaking Spaces", Borderlands E-Journal, Volume 8 Number 1, www.borderlands.net.au/vol8no1_2009/dreher_eavesdropping.pdf)//twemchen

What’s a middle class white feminist to do? Given these pitfalls, what is a middle class white woman to do? Is there any role for me in the work of creating safe spaces for new conversations? Scholarship which works across feminism, antiracism, postcolonial and critical race and

whiteness studies offers many provocative suggestions. The tradition of transnational feminism tends to focus on strategies of alliances and intersectional politics, while scholars engaging with whiteness and Indigenous sovereignties emphasise the need to unlearn privilege and give up power. Aileen Moreton-Robinson concludes her analysis of whiteness and Australian feminisms by arguing that, ‘the real challenge for white feminists is to theorise the relinquishment of power’ (2000: 186). In her analysis of speaking positions, the role of academic research and violence against Indigenous women, Sonia

Smallacombe argues that the central challenge is ‘whether feminists and their institutions interrogate their own power base and whether they are willing to move aside to give space for Indigenous women’s voices’ (2004: 51). Fiona Nicoll (2004) reflects on her own experiences as a middle-class white woman teaching critical race and whiteness

studies in Indigenous sovereignties and suggests that this teaching must challenge students to locate ‘their own

position within racialised networks of power’ and should ‘shift focus from the racialised oppression of

Indigenous Australians to the white middle-class subject position that is a direct product of this oppression’. According to Nicoll, ‘the task of non-Indigenous students and teachers becomes that of observing and beginning to denaturalize the everyday invasiveness of policies and practices underpinned by patriarchal white sovereignty’ (2004: 6). These are compelling reminders that white women must do their own race work and focus attention on their own privileges and power (see also Ratcliffe 2005: 5-6). This can be

difficult and uncomfortable work, in which good intentions are deeply suspect. Alison Jones (1999) contends that ‘even good intentions by the dominant group are not always sufficient to enable their ears to ‘hear’, and therefore for the other to ‘speak’. Many authors analyse the ways in which racism is perpetuated under the guise of ‘good intentions’ and Damien Riggs (2004: 9) highlights Jane Haggis’ suggestion that Australian critical race and whiteness studies ‘should not be about making non-Indigenous people ‘comfortable’, but should instead continue to destabilise the assumptions of privilege that inform non-Indigenous belonging’ . My involvement in this project, and the writing of this paper, has been uncomfortable and uncertain. I have experienced levels of panic far greater than my usual nervousness

before public speaking — and this anxiety has manifested bodily, in sleeplessness and loss of appetite and nausea and shivering. Mindful of Sara Ahmed’s (2004) analyses of ‘bad feeling’, I reflect on these discomforts as a register of the violent colonial histories and ongoing racisms which form the possibilities for action and change, rather than as markers of an end to or an overcoming of racism. Rather than transcending ‘bad feeling’ the challenge is to work to redistribute risk and discomfort as a means to developing better possibilities for listening and speaking.

Link – Kundnani Kundnani’s scholarsip ignores the intricacies of the Muslim culture and fails to analyze gender hierarchy Rashid, 14—a Research Associate in the Sociology Department at the University of Manchester, PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics (Dr. Naaz, May 2014, "Book Review: The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror by Arun Kundnani", The London School of Economics and Political Science, blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2014/07/08/book-review-the-muslims-are-coming-islamophobia-extremism-and-the-domestic-war-on-terror-by-arun-kundnani/)//twemchen

The issue of terrorism continues to dominate the news whether in relation to the allegations of extremism in Birmingham schools or the long term repercussions of young British Muslims going to fight in Syria and Iraq. What links these two stories is the common sense understanding about how people come to commit acts of

terrorist violence. In his new book, The Muslims are Coming, Arun Kundnani’s primary focus is the ‘radicalization thesis’ which underpins the moral panics underlying both phenomena. That is, the idea that people become radicalised through exposure to ‘extremist’ ideologies which can then lead them to engage in acts of terrorism. Through his rigorously researched analysis of preventive counterterrorism measures in the UK and US, Kundnani skilfully and articulately deconstructs the central tenets of these dominant discourses regarding radicalisation and extremism. Kundnani’s stated aims are to consider: firstly, how Islamic ideology has come to be regarded as the root cause of terrorism; and secondly, that acceptance of Muslims as citizens is predicated on them (us) distancing themselves from any particular set of ideological beliefs. He argues that “official and popular understandings of terrorism are more a matter of ideological projection and fantasy than of objective assessment.” (p. 17). He suggests that the events in both Boston and Woolwich fit the “current war on terror paradigm of young Muslim men becoming radicalised through their exposure to Islamist ideology”. This is despite the fact that in both instances, although not acting entirely alone, the perpetrators were amateurs with no connection to wider networks or terrorist cells. The transatlantic comparison allows Kundnani to showcase his detailed scholarship of policies, both in theory and in practice, weaving together the continuities and parallels between each country’s experiences. Common to both countries is the underlying belief in ‘the myth of radicalization’. As Kundnani writes, the term was little used prior to 2001, whereas by 2004 it “had acquired its new meaning of a psychological or theological process by which Muslims move toward extremist views”; so much so that by 2010 over 100 articles on the topic were being published in peer-reviewed academic journals each year (p 119). Despite this wealth of research, however, Kundnani argues that the underlying ideological assumptions mean that radicalization scholars systematically fail to address the reality of the political conflicts they claim to understand. Kundnani delineates the divergent histories of the UK and US’s respective Muslim populations in the context of very different, albeit occasionally intertwined, histories of (neo)imperialism, migration, and racial politics. He goes on to suggest, however, that 2005 represented a watershed year in which the 7/7 bombings in London brought the UK into close alignment with the US. As a result, the substantive historical, socio-political and demographic differences fell away and the UK and the US were united, not only in their ideologically inspired military encroachments, but also in their preventive counter terrorism measures against ‘home grown’ terrorism. This is perhaps where it could be argued that the book’s

weakness lies. Kundnani’s scrupulous attention to detail that so enriches his critique of the common sense logic regarding the relationship between radicalization and terrorism is absent in this analysis. If, as he argues, the fundamental flaw with the radicalization thesis is its failure to take into account the wider socio- and geo-political context within which such political violence occurs, then equally, in order to assess the outcome of policies based on it , the localised differences between and within the US and UK surely warrant more nuanced analysis. At times he does address US-specific contexts such as the more overt tactics of create and capture used there, which almost amounts to the entrapment of potential terrorists. He also writes a coruscating indictment of Obama’s term in office in which the militaristic jingoism of George Bush has become dangerously banal, bureaucratic, and routine, such that the practice and function of the anti-Muslim racism which has been fostered has rendered invisible “the

violence of the US empire” (p 14). On balance, however, the differences between the two countries are flattened out and the differential country-specific impacts of such initiatives remain somewhat unexplored. In the British context for example, the Prevent agenda cannot be assessed in isolation from the community cohesion agenda which preceded it and broader debates on multiculturalism and Britishness which foreground it. An underexplored side effect of the Prevent agenda in the UK is its impact on ‘inter community’ relations given the particularities of the postcolonial British experience. Sikhs have not, for example, been widely ‘misrecognised’ as Muslims in the UK as they have in the US (where the ‘Don’t Freak I’m a Sikh’ campaign emerged). Similarly, it is not clear whether Sikhs in the US have been drawn to far-right groups premised on an anti-Muslim platform as has occurred in the case of the BNP and the EDL in the UK. Given Kundnani’s previous work for the anti-racist left organisation the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) as well as his earlier publications, such as The End of Tolerance and Spooked! – his analysis of such differences would undoubtedly have been

astute. Furthermore, the book does not situate the radicalisation debate in relation to the wider cultural pathologisation of Muslims in both countries as well as across the globe, for example, in relation to Muslim women, and the way in which these discourses are so heavily gendered. Nonetheless, given the virulent tenacity with which the violent extremism/radicalisation/counterterrorism discourse matrix permeates the public policy imaginary, in spite of little evidence to support the conceptual framework which underlies it, the book is a very timely intervention. Kundnani draws on a wide range of material to support his case, ranging from the work of Arendt to the analysis of

populist representations of terrorism in TV series such as Homeland and South Park. There is also a wealth of research into and analysis of particular cases of counter terrorist activity and interventions which can challenge the established orthodoxies prevailing on both sides of the Atlantic (although these in depth examples might have benefitted from a more conventional bibliography and index). The Muslims are Coming should be required reading for officials and Ministers in the Home Office, Department of Communities & Local Government, the Department of Education, and the Department for Homeland Security, as well as for

political commentators everywhere. However, for those engaged in critical studies of the racialised (and gendered) politics of the war on terror, fewer examples and more critical, country-specific analysis of the impact of such measures would have been welcome.

Link – Islamic PrinciplesTheir 1ac proudly proclaims the ability of Islam to lead to self-discipline and cites Malcolm X—absent from that description is the truth the Koran and Sunna at the heart of contemporary Islam is usually quoted to justify misogynistic practices in the Muslim community Ali, 7—a fellow of the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and founder of the AHA Foundation (Ayaan Hirshi, 8/2/7, “My View of Islam”, https://www.aei.org/publication/my-view-of-islam/)//tamara&twemchen

The undisputed definition of Islam by all her adherents is “submission to the will of Allah.” This divine will is outlined in the Koran and in the teachings and deeds of Muhammad, as recorded in the Hadith or Sunna.While the Koran is considered to be the true, undiluted word of God revealed to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, the Sunna carry less weight and have always been a cause for

disagreement amongst Muslim scholars. Theologians of Islam have, however, reached consensus on the authority of a set of six

volumes from the Sunna called the Sahih Sita, or authentic six.On the issues of holy war (jihad), apostasy and the treatment of women, the Koran and Sunna are clear. It is the obligation of every Muslim to spread Islam to unbelievers first through dawa, or proselytizing, then through jihad, if the unbelievers refuse to convert. It is the obligation of the unbelievers to accept Islam. Exempted from this edict of conversion are the people of the book: Christians and Jews. Both peoples have a choice. They may adopt Islam and enjoy the same rights as other Muslims, or they may stick to their book and lead the life of a dhimmi (lower citizen). Legally, the rights of the dhimmi are not equal to those of a Muslim. For instance, a Muslim man may take a Jewish or Christian wife, but Jews and Christians are not allowed to marry Muslim women. If a Christian or a Jew kills a Muslim man, they should be killed immediately. In contrast, the blood of a

Muslim should never be shed in recompense for the blood of Christians or Jews.The western world would be wise to recognize the realities of Islam, a religion laid down in writing over a millennium ago with violence and oppression at its heart.It is also the obligation of every Muslim to command virtue and forbid vice. Apostasy, the worst possible vice a Muslim can commit, should be punished by death. The punishment need not be carried out by a state, but can easily be enforced by civilians. When it is a question of Islamic law, justice is in the

hands of every Muslim.As for the treatment of women, in the Koran and more elaborately in the Sunna, Islam assigns to girls a position in the family that requires them to be docile , makes them dependent on their male relatives for

money and gives dominion over their bodies to these same male kin. In Islam there is a strict hierarchy of subservience. First and foremost, all humans are required to be the slaves of Allah. In Muslim societies, all children must obey their parents. Beyond this,

women and girls must obey and serve without question their male guardians and especially their husbands. This decree of marital obedience is not in any way reciprocal.A woman in Islam is not competent and must always have a guardian. The responsibility of guardianship may pass

from father to brother to uncle before a girl is married off, at which point she must answer to her husband. Marriage is typically arranged, with no

choice given to the girl, and there is often an exchange of money in the process. Thus, under the religious rule of Islam, it is still common today that a woman’s rights are essentially sold to a man she may not know, and most likely does not

love.As for education of girls under Islam, there is a clear program of indoctrination of inequality . Under Islam, education

is the passing on of the rules of submission to the will of Allah. Intrinsic in this “education” is the dictation of gender roles. Girls are instructed in subservience first to God, then to the family and finally to the husband. There is strict emphasis on modesty, defined by virginity. A Muslim girl is taught to guard fiercely her virginity as an expression of loyalty to her creator and to her family and

husband.This form of education hampers her chances of ever becoming self-reliant or financially independent. A woman’s lack of social equality and freedom is a direct consequence of the teachings of Islam . Under Islam, a wife must always ask her husband for permission and she must obey indefinitely. This stricture is lifted in the unique event that he asks her to forsake God, wherein she is allowed the right of disobedience. While it is true that in Islam, technically speaking, women have the right to trade and own property, the condition of total obedience to guardians makes this “freedom” hypothetical, at best.The goal of education given to girls under Islam is the achievement of control over female

sexuality. The result of this indoctrination is that Muslim girls believe legitimate and often vocally defend their position of subordination. The lengths a Muslim society will go to in the pursuit of sexual control often cross into the territory of the absurd and, by western standards, criminal. In Islam the

minimum age of marriage for a girl is after her first menstruation. Muhammad was engaged to his wife Aisha when she was six years old, and he married her (had intercourse with her) when she turned nine. Millions of Muslim men across the world follow Muhammad in this deed, one of the most prominent examples being the late Ayatollah Khomeini.Under sharia law (Islamic law), such as governs in Saudi Arabia, Iran and parts of Nigeria, the civil rights

of women are dramatically reduced. Threat of violent punishment in the form of whipping and stoning makes the

prospect of financial independence and sexual freedom for women all but impossible. Miraculously, even in such harsh circumstances you will find women who are relatively well educated, have some say in choosing a husband and manage to earn a living. Let us be clear that these exceptions are due to the compassion and progressiveness of families who have been influenced by the West, and not to rules derived from Islam.In the quest for reconciliation between Muslim and western societies, it is important to recognize that Muslims are as diverse as Islam is monolithic. Islam attempts to unify more than a billion people of different geographical origins, languages, ethnicities, and cultural and educational backgrounds into one religious tribe. And while I acknowledge that generally stereotyping believers is difficult since belief is subjective, for the sake of discussion I would like to distinguish between five types of Muslims.The first group includes those Muslims who leave the faith because they cannot reconcile it with their conscience or with modernity. This group is important for the evolution of the Islamic world because they ask the urgent and critical questions believers usually avoid. Ex-Muslims living in the west are just beginning to find their voice and to take advantage of the spiritual and social freedoms available to them.The second group is comprised of genuine Muslim reformers, such as Irshad Manji, who acknowledge the theological out-datedness of the Koranic commands and the immorality of the prophet. They tend to emphasize the early chapters in the Koran urging goodness, generosity and spirituality. They argue that the latter chapters wherein Islam is politicized and the concepts of sharia, jihad and martyrdom are introduced should be read in the context in which they were written, some 1,400 years ago.The third group is made up of those Muslims who support the gradual perpetuation and domination of Islam throughout the world. They use the freedoms offered in democracy to undermine social modernity and, though initially opposed to the use of violence, foresee that once the number of believers reaches a critical mass the last remnants of unbelievers may then be dealt with in violence, and sharia law may be universally implemented. Ayatollah Khomeini used this method successfully in Iran. Erdogan of Turkey is following in his footsteps. Tariq Ramadan, deeply rooted in his Muslim Brotherhood heritage, is devoted to such a program among European Muslims.The fourth group is the most obvious and immediately threatening. In this group we find a growing number of hard-line Muslims who have defined martyrdom as their only goal. This is an army of young men whipped into a frenzy of suicidal violence by power hungry clergy. These clergy have public platforms and work with impunity from institutions untouched and often funded by national authorities.The fifth group is largely ineffective and only threatening in their refusal to acknowledge the truth. Here we find

the elite clergy who make a show of trying to reconcile Islam with modernity. They are motivated by self-preservation and have no interest in true reform. They take selective passages from the holy books to make a case for a peaceful Islam, ignoring the many passages inciting violence, such as those verses which command the death of apostates.It is through the first two of these five groups that progress and reform will come. As for the

rest, the western world would be wise to recognize the realities of Islam, a religion laid down in writing over a millennium ago with violence and oppression at its heart.

Link—Silence The 1ac spent 8 minutes creating a simplistic victim narrative that rightly calls out imperial policy but says nothing of the oppression and genuine terror many Muslim women face daily – their lack of discussion of the oppression of Muslim women isn’t some innocent omission, it’s rooted in Islam misogynist practices—the “rights” of American Muslims that the aff advocates for is at the dowry of Muslim women worldwideTBOS, 14—Tall Black One Sugar (feminist blogger, 5/3/14, http://tallblackonesugar.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/misogyny-boko-haram-and-the-bigger-picture/)//tamara&twemchen

We must understand how the struggle of Burkinabe women today is part of the worldwide struggle of all women and, beyond that, part of the

struggle for the full rehabilitation of our continent. The condition of women is therefore at the heart of the question of humanity itself, here, there, and everywhere. – Thomas Sankara Flight MH370 disappeared out of the sky and there was untold news coverage. Chaos erupts in Ukraine without Russia even using its military might. Daily coverage. A ferry containing hundreds of students sinks. Again untold coverage. Two hundred and thirty plus students are kidnapped from a school in Northern Nigeria. Minimal coverage. That is until social media kicked in demanding why the government of Nigeria and other surrounding governments have done nothing to step in and say or do anything. Of course William Hague and Gordon Brown have been vocal on this matter but by and large the #BringBackOurGirls campaign has pushed this issue into the spotlight where most media coverage both here in the UK, and by the sounds of it across the pond in the US, have been somewhat muted. The Nigerian government have been woeful in either addressing this publicly or corralling external support to help deal with this. Whilst Goodluck Jonathan (a misnomer if I ever seen one) and his staff swan around inept to tackle or investigate this further, a much bigger picture emerges here. That where women’s lives are not considered as something worth worrying about. What if there were 200 plus

foreign nationals? Blonde blue eyed middle class girls? (Yes, I went there!) What if Boko Haram had hijacked a depot owned by any of the multinationals like Shell, etc? Dare I say it what would have happened if it were boys? One cannot help to think about the underlying misogyny which prevents this inaction. Violence against women is nothing new. We are inundated with other reports where rape, sexual slavery, and other abhorrent uses of physical force to subordinate women are prevalent. Whether it be in Congo, the shooting of the student Malala in Pakistan, or the recent trials in the UK were cases show that men of influence felt that it was the norm to take sexual advantage of younger women. To use and dispose of them as

property. This mass kidnapping just goes to reinforce the twisted mindset prevalent not just in Nigeria but across the globe as a whole. There are those who will go even deeper to recognise that the US in part, helped to fund bodies like Boko Haram to destabilise Nigeria. Whether you side with Wikileaks on such a revelation or dismiss it as a conspiracy theory that still pales into insignificance

when you realise the patriarchy of governance in Nigeria have done nothing of substance to tackle this crime. To actually lift a finger to rescue their daughters. Our daughters. What makes a group like Boko Haram fear a learned and educated woman so much that they will twist concepts of the Quran to their own end and wilfully abduct a whole generation of young ladies for their own causes? If some reports are to believed to force some into marriage or sexual slavery. And all in the name of Allah. Go figure. Religion becomes but another vehicle to perpetuate misogyny.

2nc—Alt WallIslamic feminism should be your lens of analysis—this framework greater incorporates Muslim identityMalik 10 (Waleed Malik, York University - Osgoode Hall Law School, Carleton University, “Islamic Feminism”, Critique: A worldwide journal of politics, Fall 2010)//ASMITH

As has repeatedly been emphasized, the work carried out by “Islamic feminists” described in the previous sections has enormous potential for politics, in terms of altering notions of legitimate and illegitimate, not just in the lives of millions of individuals across the world but at the levels of institutions, states, and societies as well; but in a sense, the work can also be very limited if carried out just in the ivory towers of the academia. But there are a number of social changes happening within the Muslim world and a number of actors that promise to translate these ideas and the products of these intellectual exercises into some real social change. This change, however, will probably not be coming from within the official institutions of Islam, though it would be wrong to consider them as completely unchanging. Religious establishments have, for instance, moved beyond killing any woman who attempts to become a preacher. There are debates occurring within Shiite establishments over whether or not women should be allowed to reach the highest level of the clergy51 and recently, within the world of Sunni Islam, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced that it will soon appoint a female mufti, which is the highest category in the Sunni clergy, which is an extremely contentious first.52 Furthermore, women have been able to access institutions of religious education, allowing them a greater voice in religious debates,53 and are also a growing presence in lower levels of religious organizations, such as lower level preachers, ceremonies held in people’s homes, which allow them to play a greater, often crucial, role in the daily experience of religion for many people, including women.54 But, by and large, these institutions are still almost entirely run by men, and remain some of the most traditional and conservative elements within their societies, so it is probably naive to think that any great societal change will flow from their direction.55 However, as previously mentioned, there has simultaneously been a “resurgence” of Islam and a “fracturing” of religious authority, which has meant that there has been a growth of organizations that in some way claim an Islamic identity and a growth in their ability to speak about religion in a way and with an authority that had once been the exclusive tool of the clergy.56 For instance, after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, there was an obvious increase in the role of the clergy and of religion, but simultaneously there was an increase in welfare organizations, advocacy organizations, and magazines that allowed women a chance to further their voices and their interests on these matters. The fight for women’s rights in Iran has been waged both by secular organizations but also by Islamic ones, to the extent that during the Bonn Conference held in 2001 to determine the future of Afghanistan, a number of feminists there held up Iran as an example of a country where women’s rights, though still not adequately accepted or protected, had been greatly enhanced though an Islamic framework.57 In fact, modern day Iran presents a number of examples that shed light on both the effectiveness of “Islamic feminism” as well as the difficulties and limitations it encounters as an environment where Islam has been used both by those who would seek to limit and reduce women’s rights and public role and those who are determined to expand it. In the aftermath of the revolution, the theocratic government that was formed held a neo-traditionalist perspective about Islam and its edicts on women, which assumed that there were some natural differences between the sexes due to which women were appropriate for certain roles (as wives and mothers) and men for

others, and it was this perspective that led the government to try to force women out of the judiciary and out of regular employment, preventing them from receiving higher education in many fields and instituting many changes that dramatically scaled back advances women had made in previous decades.58 However, the women of Iran, including Islamist ones, refused to accept such measures without a fight. Women, many of them from traditional backgrounds, had played an unprecedented role in the revolution and refused to be marginalized by the regime. When the government tried to force them out of the workforce they formed volunteer organizations (some of them for the war effort against Iraq and many of them with an obvious Islamic motivation) and engaged in activism to remain visible, and when the regime used their discourse of difference to exclude women, the few female members of parliament at the time used that as an argument for why women had to be included, to have different points of view. This fight was largely carried out by four women who were the members of parliament, the majlis, in the eighties and who had been deeply involved in the Islamic revolution. It was clear to them that the Islamic state that was emerging was radically different from what they had expected, and they were determined to have their voice heard in shaping it in a more just manner. And though they did not succeed in halting the conservative tide, they managed to win certain concessions such as having women play an advisory role in the judiciary and, slowly, they were able to remove some restrictions on women being able to work and gain a higher education.59 However, greater change began to emerge in the late eighties and early nineties. The change was originally discernible in a number of magazines that had been set up by women to discuss women’s issues, and which often had clerics write for them. At this time there emerged a trend known as “new religious thinking” which argued the inequality that was associated with Islam was the result of a certain historical context in which those interpretations occurred, and that in truth there was no conflict (or rather an affinity) between gender equality and Islam.60 Ultimately the ideas of these magazines spread into society, into more mainstream newspapers, and eventually epitomized the reform movement. This was a movement that was based around the notion of “dynamic jurisprudence” and was exemplified by Mohammad Khatami’s overwhelming victory in the Presidential election of 1997. This was also an important moment for the women’s movement in Iran because Khatami, himself a cleric, had promised many reforms to encourage gender equality in order to gain the support of women, both Islamist and secular, which proved essential to his victory. And though his government saw both symbolic gains, such as by appointing the first female Vice-President in the history of the Islamic Republic, and meaningful improvements, in terms of providing greater education and employment opportunities for women and creating a less repressive environment, he was unable to push most of his reforms through against the wishes of the conservative clerics who held the power to veto all legislation; and ultimately, after the end of Khatami’s two terms, the movement fizzled out due to a combination of repression by the state, economic difficulties and an inability to deliver on many promises. Despite that, and though there was much it failed to tackle, the movement provided a hopeful glimpse of what could be achieved from an Islamic framework and it did make some meaningful improvements for the rights and status of Iranian women.61

Islamic Fem constructs new understandings and is the only way to disrupt patriarchy Malik 10 (Waleed Malik, York University - Osgoode Hall Law School, Carleton University, “Islamic Feminism”, Critique: A worldwide journal of politics, Fall 2010)//ASMITH

That changed dramatically in the twentieth century. A massive explosion in literacy in the Muslim world meant that, for the first time, a large number of people were no longer reliant on the traditional clerical

class in order to access the intellectual foundations of their faith. Authority in Islam “fractured”, a process that continues to take place today as more and more people turn to the sources of their religion themselves and formulate their own understandings of their religion rather than simply accepting what is handed down from the clerics.15 It has also mean that for the first time in Islamic history women are able to access the sources of Islam on their own in large numbers, and in doing so they are constructing a new understanding of the religion that is dramatically different from that produced in ninth century Arabia.16 Though a varied and extremely dissimilar group, almost all of the women who have turned to their faith in this manner (whether scholars or Islamist activists) argue that it is not Islam but rather an interpretation of it that is to blame for the oppression suffered by Muslim women. They argue that the Shariah was created by a group of men without any meaningful participation by women, who were in fact actively marginalized from the process of defining the faith,17 and that these men, from times and societies that were unabashedly misogynistic, read their patriarchal prejudices into a faith that had actually been progressive and empowering for women.18 Groups such as the Taliban, who justified their oppressive policies in the name of Islam, are condemned as actually perverting the religion in order to justify their patriarchal beliefs and the unequal power structure between the sexes that exists in traditional Afghan society.19 Some have gone so far as to argue that the real reason why the traditional understanding of Islam is so pernicious for women is because it is pervaded by values and attitudes of the jahiliyya, the pre-Islamic era of Arabia which is generally considered as the height of moral and social depravity in Islam, which the Prophet Muhammad tried but failed to eradicate and which reasserted themselves after his death through the “Islam” fashioned by the ulema and the ayatollahs.20 One scholar has, probably metaphorically, claimed that it was a “Satanic logic” that led jurists to insert their patriarchal assumptions when considering the rights of women in Islam, which have (with the passage of time and encouraged by prejudices of societies around them) acquired the status of a “neutral” and correct reading of the religion.21 All of these are very powerful condemnations and reveals the strength of these women’s conviction that it is not Islam, but rather a perversion of it, that would deny rights due to them. And there seem to be a number of examples, some of them remarkably blatant, that “Islamic feminists” could utilize to substantiate their claim that it is a perverted version of Islam that legitimizes the subjugation of women and that the religion should have and, but for a series of patriarchal interpreters would have, been very different. For instance, a Quranic verse instructing Muslims not to “pass on your wealth and property to the feeble-minded,” was interpreted by nearly all of the early commentators as referring to women and children, who were to be deprived of all inheritance, despite specific Quranic injunctions against such an interpretation and in direct contradiction to specific rights of inheritance laid out in Islam for women and children. Or when a person called Abu Said al-Khurdi swore he had heard the Prophet tell a group of women, “I have not seen anyone more deficient in intelligence and religion than you,” not only was his claim interpreted as describing the nature of all women across all times despite the lack of any indication of this sort in the saying, his claims and its interpretations were left unchallenged despite the fact that there is ample evidence that the Prophet Muhammad repeatedly sought the advice of his wives and other women, even in military matters.22 Or consider the treatment of Aisha, one of the Prophet’s wives and a prominent personality within early Islamic history, who is treated as an aberration for playing a public role (which is not true as shall be shown later) and who is condemned as being responsible for derailing the unity of the Muslim world and for single-handedly setting off all the conflict that has been experienced in the Muslim world by leading a rebellion against the fourth caliph, which is a ridiculous claim to make, and which is then interpreted as

legitimating the exclusion of all Muslim women from the public realm, which does would not logically follow even if the first ridiculous claim was true.23

Islamic Feminism resolves equity and tolerance Mirza 08 (Qudsia Mirza is Frances Lewis Law Center Scholar-in-Residence at Washington and Lee University, School of Law, US.)(“Islamic Feminism & Gender Equality”, I S I M R E V I E W 2 1 / S P R I N G 2 0 0 8, pg 30-31)//ASMITH

The ethical project of Islamic feminism shares the central ideals and values of Islam itself—of justice, egalitarianism, equity, compassion, and tolerance. By opening up the question of who has the authority to interpret scripture, and by challenging the power of traditional interpretive communities and the producers of religious knowledge, Islamic feminists are at the forefront of the contemporary reformist movement. Writers such as Amina Wadud and Asma Barlas are conferring upon themselves the authority to challenge the monopoly of traditional interpreters of the Quran, whilst scholars such as Fatima Mernissi are engaged in contesting received notions of Hadith literature. All such scholars are engaged in revisiting Islamic sources and actively furthering what has been succinctly termed the “democratization of ijtihad.”1 Working within Islamic jurisprudence, this entails the use of an interpretive methodology, ijtihad (to strive for) to dynamically re-interpret foundational Quranic principles in order to bring about equal rights for women. Feminists look to the time of Islam’s origin and assert that women, who had played a significant role as the creators of oral texts, became invisible after the inception of Islam, both as originators and interpreters of such texts. Scriptural literature was then produced by men who incorporated their own restrictive assumptions and understanding of gender relations. Legal texts were also created in this way and a masculine bent was inscribed into the legal literature of that time, resulting in the atrophying of the egalitarian ethos of Islam.2 Thus, the feminist project is based squarely upon an Islamic framework within which an ethically correct gender paradigm and resulting legal rights for women may be configured. The reform of Islamic law is seen as one of the principal means by which the discrimination women have suffered under certain interpretations of Islam can be addressed. In pursuance of this, feminists are advancing new interpretations of the sources of Islamic law, and theorizing a “liberatory praxis” with a “Quranic hermeneutics of liberation” at the vanguard of this endeavour. This means that writers such as Wadud and Barlas are utilizing the notion of ijtihad to establish interpretations of the Quran which bring to light the gender egalitarian impulse of the Quran. These new interpretations then form the basis for an emancipatory agenda for the establishment of equality. Therefore, this project encapsulates the vision of a post-patriarchal Islam which guarantees women legal and social rights, equal with men. This will only be possible, feminists argue, by liberating Islamic orthodox scripture from the stranglehold of male-centred interpretations that have become entrenched in the Islamic canon. Thus, by challenging traditional notions of authority, and deconstructing gendered Islamic discourses, Islamic feminists are producing interpretations of scripture that can be utilized for the radical re-configuration of gendered legal rights. However, despite this uniformity of aim, Islamic feminism is also characterized by great diversity of opinion. Therefore, it may be more appropriate to talk of Islamic feminisms which can be

differentiated by cultural and regional, as well as significant doctrinal differences, which have led to divergent schools of thought. A number of writers have offered typologies of contemporary feminist thought and, broadly speaking, they can be divided into two main groups: first, those who see the “inequality” of the sexes in Islam as divinely ordained; and second, those who have engaged in progressive readings of the Quran and the Hadith to unearth the authentic configuration of women’s rights in Islam.

2nc—Chilling Effect Discussion of Islam is often considered Islamophobic- that impedes understanding of the religion and its problems- it’s a reverse chilling effectBenn 7 (Piers Benn. “On Islamophobia-phobia.” May 31, 2007. https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/524/on-islamophobia-phobia) //EMerz

The act of hatred that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York led, unsurprisingly, to anti-Muslim feeling in both America and Britain,

and the suspicion that it was carried out with the blessing of Islam. George W. Bush and Tony Blair hurriedly tried to counter this impression. They denounced anti-Muslim feeling and taunts and attacks on Muslims . Blair stated that the principles of Islam do not support the deliberate killing of innocent civilians 'Islam', he announced, means 'peace' and claimed

that Muslims who support terrorist attacks are out of line with the authentic teachings of their religion. In one way, Blair was right. Social psychology and everyday experience show us how easy it is to dehumanise an opponent and project onto him all our worst fears and fantasies. This primitive tendency appears on all sides, whether in the intractably paranoid world view of Osama bin Laden, or in the suspicion that all Muslims are somehow implicated in the attacks. It is unacceptable that the hatred of out-groups – in this case, 'infidels' – that led to the original horror

should show itself, on the other side, in hatred of Muslims. At the same time, the attack provided various pundits and politicians with an excuse to reiterate their concerns about 'Islamophobia'. We often hear that Islamophobia is

widespread in the British media and culture. As a result, considerable efforts are made to counter the image of Islam as an intolerant religion – a faith that supports terrorism, cuts off limbs, and subordinates women. 'Moderate' British Muslims are regularly summoned onto the media to represent Islam's acceptable face and to challenge these stereotypes – among them academics like Zaki Badawi and Ali Akbar, and well-known journalists such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Rana Kabbani and Ziauddin Sardar.

Furthermore, many politicians appear reluctant to say anything critical of Islam. In an edition of Radio Four's 'Any Questions' last Autumn, the panel was asked to respond to former Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi's reported claim that Western civilisation was superior to Islamic civilisation. The panel, which included Charles Kennedy and Chris Patten, was unanimous in pouring scorn on Berlusconi's remarks. Such an outburst, in their opinion, exemplified ignorant, crude, racist cultural imperialism. All of this raises two matters of concern. One is about the definition of Islamophobia, and the sloppy way in which the term is used. The other concerns the general indifference

to intellectual matters of religious doctrine, truth and justification. 'Islamophobia' is a negatively loaded word. Not many people would admit to being Islamophobic, any more than they would admit to being homophobic . Indeed, there is an interesting parallel between the two concepts. Although 'homophobia' really means fear of homosexuals, it is now widely used to refer to any criticism of homosexuality. Many who use the word appear oblivious to the distinction between the fear (or hatred) of homosexual individuals, and disapproval of homosexual behaviour. Of course, one might argue that language evolves and words change their meaning. But this misses the point. There is a real distinction to be made here, which needs to be reflected in language. With Islamophobia, the

same applies. It is essential to distinguish criticism of Islam both from fear of Islam, and from fear, hatred or contempt for Muslims. But all too often, moral criticism of Muslim practices, or scepticism about doctrines, is dismissed as Islamophobic. What would be a rational response to this? There are at least two strategies. One, as just suggested, is to deny any necessary connection between criticism of Islam on the one

hand, and fear of Islam or contempt for Muslims, on the other. Another, more direct one would be to ask squarely whether Islamophobia, understood as fear of Islam, is wrong after all. After all, if Islam really does advocate jihad to achieve world domination (as is claimed, for example, in a Christian website devoted to rebutting Islamic doctrines: www.answering-islam.org), if it really does say that the testimony of a woman in court is worth half that of a man, and that Muslims should not befriend Jews or Christians, then why wouldn't fear or other negative reactions be entirely reasonable? The usual counter-argument is to deny the factual accuracy of these claims about Islamic doctrine and practice. Islamophobia is said to manifest itself in ignorant and prejudiced ideas of what 'true' Islam really teaches. And it is here that the debate gets interesting, and leads to the second worry I mentioned, about public and media indifference to solid issues of truth and justification in religious matters. Indulgent theological relativism The consensus against Islamophobia – call it 'Islamophobia-phobia' – often appears oddly unconcerned to inform itself of Muslim (or even Christian) theology. In place of informed tolerance we have an indulgent and ignorant theological relativism – call it 'religious correctness' if you like – disseminating the platitude that all the major world religions are more or less the same, with the same basic values. Why do people believe this? Partly because all religions that sustain human communities through the joys, sorrows, and uncertainties of life are likely to share certain values. For example, respect for life and property, the maintenance of retributive and distributive justice, and a concern to regulate sex will probably be found in most successful religions. Moreover, if, as many non-religious people say, it is morality that gives rise to religion rather than the other way round, we would expect the best (as well as the worst) elements of human motivation to find religious expression. So it is not surprising that Muslims who are naturally civilised and humane, like the

Principal of the Muslim College in London, Zaki Badawi, tend to select the most compassionate elements in Islam as examples of its essential nature, and share many values with reflective and tolerant non-Muslims. But the idea that all religions are essentially the same is one that is rejected by clear-thinking Christians, Muslims (and others) alike. Of course, many secular people look upon internecine theological wrangles with amused condescension. However, it is of great importance both to Christians and to Muslims whether or not Jesus was divine and died for our sins, whether he rose from the dead, or whether the Koran was dictated by God. For these are issues about which orthodox Christianity and Islam are in fundamental disagreement. Their claims contradict one another; it follows that they cannot both be entirely authentic revelations. The liberal British media, anxious to distance itself from 'Islamophobia', plays these logical problems down, partly because it cannot be bothered to understand them, and partly because it cannot believe that some religious people are less wishy-washy than they are themselves. As a result, the intellectual debates we should be having get a woefully inadequate hearing. The most fundamental problem is that of the claimed status of the Koran as the infallible, revealed word of God. All Muslims are committed to this claim, although there are disputes about interpretation and emphasis, just as there are about any other sacred book. The Koran has frightening things to say about the fate of those who do not believe in God and the Last Day, and there is considerable stress on hell: God is 'stern in retribution'. Of course, if these teachings are true, then we have very good prudential reasons for trying to acquire the beliefs in question, to avoid a truly terrible fate. But as students of Pascal's Wager know, this does not settle the evidential question of whether these claims are true. Indeed, Pascal, who famously advocated acquiring Catholic beliefs for reasons of prudence, would no doubt have judged Muslims susceptible to a similar fate, and Dante placed Mohammed in the lower circles of the Inferno, among other false prophets. Suppose one asks the simple questions: what grounds are there for believing that the Koran is an authentic revelation? How likely is it, that if there were a God with an extremely important message to deliver to humanity, he would have chosen to reveal it to one man, in the way he is said to have done to Mohammed? Why not, indeed, reveal it to a large number of people, who could then compare their revelations and agree on their content? And how easily could Mohammed's belief that he was a prophet have arisen, if he was not, in fact, a recipient of divine revelations? There is no obvious difficulty about this; apart from anything else, he is far from unique in believing himself the recipient of special revelations. Think of Joseph Smith or Sun Myung Moon. Of course, Christians have been familiar with similar challenges to their scriptures for nearly two hundred years, and have developed various apologetics. In any case, apart from some 'fundamentalists', most Christians (at least outside the USA) do not believe the Bible was dictated verbatim by God, though they do believe it is divinely inspired. Indeed, Christian 'fundamentalism' of the sort we see reported, especially in connection with 'young-earth' creationism, is a largely modern phenomenon, born as a reaction to the secularisation of Christian societies and the challenge of the Enlightenment. Islamic nations have barely been secularised, and there was no Islamic equivalent of the Reformation.

Many who fear the rise of Islamophobia veer away from critical analysis of Islamic claims and practices, perhaps for fear of what they might find. They denounce critical scrutiny of Islam as somehow impolite, or ignorant of the religion's true nature. This is not intellectually or morally healthy. The real lesson of tolerance is that disputes should be settled by reasoned dialogue rather than abuse or violence, and that we should always accept that we may have much to learn from people whose beliefs initially appear strange. But these virtues are a far cry from the sentimental pretence that all claims to religious truth are somehow 'equal', or that critical

scrutiny of Islam (or any belief system) is ignorant, prejudiced, or 'phobic'. By all means let us be well-informed about Islam, but let us not assume that once we are, we shall altogether like what we find.

2nc—Root Cause The representations of terrorist threat and the fears that follow are based in gender—they’re founded on a fundamental division between the sacred world of the mother that has been identified as the world of fundamentalism and the world of the west which is defined by reason and masculinity – this psychic division is the root of Western vs Eastern fundamentalist conflict.Condren 2006 (Mary; “War, Religion, Gender and Psyche: An Irish Perspective,” in Holy War and Gender: “Gotteskrieg‟ und Geschlecht”; http://mywebgrrl.ca/ifr/000_Berlin_Paper_Final.pdf)

The sacred world, the semiotic, is the psychic field of the Mother. Therefore, whereas killing or maiming the enemy is inevitable, terrorists usually uphold strict rules of sexual conduct. Terrorist legitimacy derives from their desperate efforts to establish their righteous relations within this field . Control of their women usually

accompanies terrorism, underpinned by the most fundamentalist interpretations of religious texts. In terrorist warfare, underpinned by mythologies of self-sacrifice, especially where cultures have been subjected to colonial or imperial humiliation, masculinity is often damaged or much less secure. Establishing a high moral ground, or secure point of identity becomes the aim which is achieved effectively by controlling the bodies of women, and by denigrating and

persecuting anyone (homosexuals) who threatens rigid gender boundaries. Sexual purity rather than sexual triumph is normative. In conventional warfare sexual triumph over women is the norm and is explicitly celebrated. But since the strategies of religious and political fundamentalists are essentially female, fundamentalist regimes usually enforce the subordination of women, and the denigration or persecution of anyone (homosexuals) who threatens rigid gender boundaries. Securing such boundaries by controlling female bodies both symbolises and establishes a grammar of fundamentalism that is inter-religious and international. Fundamentalist regimes often attempt to uphold their regressive practices toward women on the grounds of ethnicity, religious freedom or human rights. In addition, religions often enjoy immunity from equality legislation, probably because of the unconscious awareness of how such religions legitimate the patriarchal assumptions at the heart of statehood. Feminist legal scholars must now be assisted in their efforts to explore and deconstruct the connections. 52 6. The Question of Representation Melanie Klein spoke of reparative strategies typical of the mother/infant relationship. The infant engages in attacks, phantasied or otherwise, on the mother’s body, but, fears disintegration or retaliation. Unconscious guilt, and the strategies of reparation that accompany it play a major role in this dynamic, and often remain with us for the rest of our lives, feeding various religious fantasies. In Christian theology, according to Julia Kristeva, such reparation is directed toward God the Father, enabling the unconscious erasure of the mother from salvation history, and achieving the foundation of paternal law. 53 The strategy enables the paternal law to supersede the dangerous maternal semiotic energies, but also succeeds in permanently exiling women from culture, except insofar as they

serve to uphold the status quo, preferably by becoming as men. Since the sacrificial dynamics and legitimating strategies of both conventional and terrorist warfare foster and depend on mythological religion , not surprisingly, in religious traditions based on sacrifice, women are not permitted to be religious officiaries. The exclusion of women from significant participation in all the major religions has widespread implications that go way beyond church practice. Political and religious agencies often work hand in hand. Furthermore the strategies outlined here point to a grammar of political relationships that is inter-religious and international. The presence or absence of women in systems of representation does not automatically correlate either with the liberation or denigration of women: the variables are

extremely complex. Nonetheless, given the analysis here, the effects of exclusively male systems of representation (such as an all male Trinity)

must be interrogated for their psychic effects as they impinge upon the possible agency of sexed subjects. 7. The Maternal Debt Patriarchal culture thrives on the defiance of death and on spurious means to transcend death. Meanwhile, the weapons of mass destruction threaten the future of civilisation itself .

2nc—Sequencing A discussion of the brutal practice of muslim communities should come firstAli, 7—a fellow of the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and founder of the AHA Foundation (Ayaan Hirshi, 8/2/7, “Infidel” pg. 347-348)//tamara&twemchen

Muhammad attempted to legislate every aspect of life . By adhering to the rules of what is permitted and what is forbidden, we Muslims suppressed the freedom to think for ourselves and to act as we chose. froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mind-set of . Arab desert in the seventh century. We were not just servants of Allah,re slaves. The little shutter at the back of my mind, where I pushed all my · sonant thoughts, snapped open after the 9/11 attacks, and it refused close again. I

found myself thinking that the Quran is not a holy mandate. It is a historical record, written by humans. It is one version as perceived by the men who wrote it 150 years after the Prop Muhammad died . And it is a very

tribal and Arab version of events. It spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women , and harsh in war.The Prophet did teach us a lot of good things. I found it spiri appealing to believe in a Hereafaet My life was enriched by the Qu injunctions to be compa(sjonate and show charity to others.JJiere times when I, like inany otheilvluslims, found it too complicated to with the whole issue of war against the unbelievers. Most Musi' never delve into theology, and we rarely read the Quran; we are taught in Arabic, which most Muslims can't speak. As a result, most people think that Islam is about peace. It is from these people, honest and kind that the

fallacy has arisen that Islam is peaceful and tolerant ,But I could no longer avoid seeing the totalitarianism, the pure moral framework that is Islam. It regulates every detail of life and subjagtes free will. True Islam, as a rigid belief is system and a moral framework leads to cruelty . The inhuman act of those nineteen hijackers was the

logical outcome of this detailed system for regulating human behavior. Their world is divided between "Us" and "Them"-if you don't accept Islam you should perish. It didn't have to be this way. The West underwent a period of religious warfare and persecution, but then society freed itself from the grip of violent organized religion . I assumed-

I still assume-that the same process could occur among the millions of Muslims . we Muslims could shed our attachment..to those dogmas that clearly lead to ignorance and opression. In fact, I thought, we were lucky: there were now.so books that Muslims could read them and leapfrog the Enlightenm , just as the Japanese have done.

2nc—Turns CaseShielding Islam from criticism in the name of resisting Islamophobia prevents effective and sustainable challenges to Islamic hatred and turns the case Deacon 14 (Liam Deacon. “Critiquing Islam or Islamophobia?” May 16, 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/liam-deacon/islamophobia_b_4973979.html) //EMerz

For nine years in a row a controversial resolution on, "Combating Defamation of Religions," described by some as an, "international blasphemy law," has been consistently losing support in the United Nations General Assembly. Until 2010, the only religion mentioned in the legislation was Islam, when the authors of the legislation, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, invented the terms; "Judeophobia and Christianophobia," too quell criticism. Domestically too, the term Islamophobia has come under intense scrutiny, just this week. Opinion is sharply divided. The discourse here in the UK often mirrors the international debate. In one camp, the appropriateness of the terms very existence is questioned; critics lambast the fact that in reality there is no equivalent terminology in existence to describe those who critique other ideologies and religions (other than Anti-Semitism, of course). They say it is telling of the particular defensiveness and privilege that Islam demonstrates and is often afforded. Others, however, maintain that the phenomena is one of the most concerning and potentially dangerous of our age. They contend that the recent increase in Islamophobia is akin to the rise of Anti-Semitism in the last century and portray Islamophobia as a current of hate, engulfing Europe and risking unrest, conflict even. There is truth on both ends of this dialectic. Islamophobia clearly exists. It is a genuine phenomenon. A 'phobia' is an irrational fear or hatred of something - one need only browse the Internet momentarily before confronting a plethora of overtly irrational, hateful and inflammatory views directed towards Muslims. On the other hand, the term is very commonly misappropriated to deflect genuine and much needed criticism of Islam. And it is grossly misappropriated when used to scare and accuse those interested in discussing theology, ethics and progress of racism and bigotry. However, misappropriation of the term is so common, and confusion so easy, because alongside the rising tide of irrational Islamophobia described by Ansar, there is an increasing need for a rational critique Islam (a process Ansar is deeply involved in himself). Religions are not static or homogeneous. They change / evolve over time and at any one time there is often a plurality of voices within any religion advocating differing interpretations. Rigorous and continuous criticism is an important catalyst for this ongoing process . Denying the need for such a critique, and assuming Islam is static and unchanging, is as crude and misleading as islamophobia itself. Religion is a historical process of change and modernization. Many early religions described man's relationship with nature. There were Gods of sun, thunder and earth. Later, religions are often seen to embody man's relationship with the state. The god of Athena, say, represented to the Greeks their relationship with the polis. Later, the great monotheistic religions of Islam and Christianity began to function as the Polis itself. Church and state became one; it was the fear of God, rather that the Police, that kept citizens in line and it was parish / sharia courts who made judicial rulings. After coming to dominate politics in Europe, Christianity did not give up its political power lightly. From Galileo to Copernicus, for centuries, owners of any voice of decent were persecuted. It was a long and bloody battle before Christianity began to communicate with post enlightenment thought. Christianity was battered and berated into submission by a reformation, enlightenment and a well-established tradition of biblical criticism. The result was the subdued and less political Christianity we know today (maybe not so in America). The simple fact is that Islam is not as far through this stage of

its historical development, through which it will be brought to communicate with post enlightenment thought and secular politics, as Christianity, which began it in the 17th century. Comparatively, very little is known about the true origins of the Koran. Historians such as Patria Crone and Tom Holland have only recently begun this mammoth task. Historical and Archeological examinations of the Bible helped Christians a great deal in reconciling their views with the realities of the modern world. Hopefully the same can be true for Islam. As I've said, Islam is far from monolithic; Muslim feminists and gay rights activists are a historical fact. But today, particularly since the Islamic resurgence, Islam is dominated by conservative, and primarily male, voices. Such voices have been politicizing the religion and pushing an oppressive, conservative social agenda. This has resulted in the social regression we see in Iran and more recently, Turkey and Egypt. Critiquing the authoritarian, misogynistic and homophobic values of these interpretations of Islam is of pivotal importance for the survival and wellbeing of millions of people worldwide. Another issue at hand is the confluence of Islamic culture with Islamic faith. If such a critique is to be as successful as it has been for Christianity then it is likely that many Muslims, especially those living in the west, will come to reject the dogmatism of religion and embrace Agnosticism and Atheism. It is critical that Apostates of Islam can hold on to their cultural identity despite losing their faith. It's been decades since people, un-ironically, discussed 'Christendom' or 'Christian culture' instead of 'western culture,' and it's time Islamic culture was more commonly afforded such respect, as something quite distinct from mere faith. As conservative Muslim populations living inside western liberal democracies become more vocal and politicized, it must be remembered that a central condition of freedom of religion is the freedom of others to criticize your religion . New Atheism and 'Dawkinism' are consistently more abrasive and less patient with conservative religious views. If every time the two groups come into conflict commentators call it Islamophobia, the true meaning and importance of the word will very soon be lost. I must stress, none of what is said above is written to suggest that the majority of Muslims today are not already moderate and do not accept post-enlightenment thought. Rather, if we are to begin to see the end of political Islam and the small but significant strains of radical Islam that western media is so obsessed with, then a vigorous and open discussion must be had about Islam. At a time when genuinely Islamophobic views are on the rise, keeping such a rational discussion distinct from genuinely Islamophobic, irrational prejudice will be increasingly difficult.

Islamophobia studies squelch discussion about legitimately dangerous countries and silences Muslim activists- this rhetoric is what extremists want- lack of criticism sets Islam up for failureSchanzer 13 (Jonathan Schanzer. “A Nasty Neologism.” January 9, 2013. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324391104578227543258640614)//EMerz

"The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends," President George W. Bush declared soon after the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Bush's statement set the tone for the tumultuous decade to come, one in which the nation prosecuted a war on terrorism in two Muslim lands while taking great pains to protect the rights of Muslim Americans. Yet if the author Nathan Lean is to be believed, Americans today are caught in the grip of an irrational fear of Islam and its adherents. In his short book on the subject, Mr. Lean, a journalist and editor at the website Aslan Media, identifies this condition using the vaguely medical sounding term "Islamophobia." It is by now a familiar diagnosis, and an ever widening range of symptoms—from daring to criticize theocratic tyrannies in the Middle East to drawing cartoons of the

Prophet Muhammad—are attributed to it. In reality, Islamophobia is simply a pejorative neologism designed to warn people away from criticizing any aspect of Islam. Those who deploy it see no difference between Islamism—political Islam and its extremist offshoots—and the religion encompassing some 1.6 billion believers world-wide. Thanks to this feat of conflation, Islamophobia transforms religious doctrines and political ideologies into something akin to race; to be an "Islamophobe" is in some circles today tantamount to being a racist. American Islamophobia, Mr. Lean claims, is fomented by a "small cabal of xenophobes." "The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims" is less a book than a series of vignettes about some of these antagonists, who are "bent on scaring the public about Islam." His Islamophobic figures and institutions range from political leaders like Mr. Bush, Sen. John McCain and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who, Mr. Lean says, have "harnessed Muslims and Islam to terrorism"; to the pro-Israel community, which is alleged to be animated by a "violent faith narrative" and funded by magnates who inject "eye-popping cash flows into the accounts of various fear campaigns"; to pretty much everyone who campaigned in 2010 against the construction of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque near the site of the 9/11 attacks in lower Manhattan. Mr. Lean tars with the same brush the likes of the scholar Daniel Pipes and the Muslim activist, physician and U.S. Navy veteran Zuhdi Jasser. Mr. Pipes, the author writes, is "deeply entrenched in the business of selling fear." He portrays Dr. Jasser as a puppetlike figure, "a 'good Muslim,' one that openly and forcefully denounced various tenets of his faith." These are crude and uncharitable caricatures of these men. Mr. Pipes was one of the first Western commentators to raise the alarm about the subterranean spread of extremist attitudes in both the Middle East and among some Muslim communities in the West. Dr. Jasser, a devout Muslim, is the founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, an organization that advances the notion that "the purest practice of Islam is one in which Muslims have complete freedom to accept or reject any of the tenants or laws of the faith no different than we enjoy as Americans in this Constitutional republic." Both men argue that the real contest is the serious war of ideas raging within Islam itself, between the forces of liberalism and pluralism and those of obscurantism. To Mr. Lean, though, any such distinction is simply a false perception manufactured by Islamophobes. Thus the author fails to grapple with the fact that, unlike average Muslims, Islamist terror groups like al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah do commit unspeakable acts of violence in the name of Islam—actions that surely help account for why many Americans (49%, according to a 2010 poll) hold an unfavorable view of Islam, even when they view favorably Muslims that they personally know. Mr. Lean also can't seem to tell the difference between Islamist organizations and ordinary Muslims. Consider his view of the Council on American Islamic Relations, a self-proclaimed civil-rights organization that wields outsize influence on questions of Muslim integration in the U.S. Mr. Lean barely mentions CAIR and, when he does, it is in invariably glowing terms. The author lauds "cooperation between the FBI and CAIR" that supposedly "led to the capture of five American Muslim men in Pakistan suspected of trying to join radical, anti-American forces." But he neglects to mention that CAIR was named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror-finance trial of 2007. The same group, according to an unclassified State Department cable, sought to raise $50 million for an Islamophobia campaign from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Islamist states and groups have been at the forefront of promoting the concept of Islamophobia. As far back as 1999, the United Association for Studies and Research, a group founded by Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook, published a book that purported to expose "The Truth Behind the Anti-Muslim Campaign in America." After 9/11, Muslim states mounted a campaign to characterize the fear of Muslim violence as blind hatred. In 2004, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan assured the world that U.N. "special rapporteurs continue

to monitor the exercise and infringements of this right [freedom of religion], and to recommend ways to combat Islamophobia." According to anti-Islamophobia crusaders, though, even questioning the origins of the concept is itself a form of Islamophobia. Such dogmatism chills the crucial conversations that need to take place about Islamism here in the West . It also does a profound injustice to liberal Muslims around the world. After all, if Islam is dominated by its most violent and illiberal elements, and questioning these forces is deemed by intellectual elites to be a form of racism, then reform-minded Muslims really stand no chance.

A2 Cherry Picking Even if limited experiences don’t speak to the structural truth of Islam, they reveal personal struggles we have to recognize– it’s the same reason your authors that reveal the stories of individual Muslim Americans is key to breaking down the Surveillance StateKundnani, 14—professor at New York University (Arun, 3/28/14, "No NSA reform can fix the American Islamophobic surveillance complex", The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/28/nsa-reform-american-islamophobic-surveillance-complex)//twemchen

Better oversight of the sprawling American national security apparatus may finally be coming: President Obama and the House Intelligence Committee unveiled plans this week to reduce bulk collection of telephone records. The debate opened up by Edward

Snowden's whistle-blowing is about to get even more legalistic than all the parsing of hops and stores and metadata. These reforms may be reassuring, if sketchy. But for those living in so-called " suspect communities " – Muslim Americans, left-wing campaigners, "radical" journalists – the days of living on the receiving end of excessive spying won’t end there. How come when we talk about spying we don't talk about the lives of ordinary people being spied upon? While we have been rightly outraged at the government's

warehousing of troves of data, we have been less interested in the consequences of mass surveillance for those most affected by it – such as Muslim Americans. In writing my book on Islamophobia and the War on Terror, I spoke to dozens of Muslims,

from Michigan to Texas and Minnesota to Virginia. Some told me about becoming aware their mosque was under surveillance only

after discovering an FBI informant had joined the congregation. Others spoke about federal agents turning up at colleges to question[ing] every student who happened to be Muslim . All of them said they felt unsure whether their

telephone calls to relatives abroad were wiretapped or whether their emails were being read by government officials. There were the young Somali Americans in Minnesota who described how they and their friends were questioned by FBI agents for no reason other than their ethnic background. Some had been placed under surveillance by a local police department , which disguised its spying as a youth mentoring program and then passed the FBI intelligence on Somali-American political opinions. There were the Muslim students at the City University of New York who discovered that fellow students they had befriended had been informants all along, working for the New York Police Department's Intelligence Division and tasked with surveilling them. There was no reasonable suspicion of any crime; it was enough that the targeted students were active in the Muslim Students Association. And then there was Luqman Abdullah, a Detroit-based African-American imam, whose mosque was infiltrated by the FBI, leading to a 2009 raid in which he was shot and killed by federal agents. The government had no evidence of any terrorist plot; the sole pretext was that Abdullah had strongly critical views of the US government. These are the types of people whom the National Security Agency can suspect of being two "hops" away from targets. These are the types of "bad guys" referred to by outgoing NSA

director Keith Alexander. Ten years ago, around 100,000 Arabs and Muslims in America had some sort of national security file compiled on them. Today, that number is likely to be even higher. A study published last year by the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition documented the effects of this kind of mass

surveillance. In targeted communities, a culture of enforced self-censorship takes hold and relationships of trust start to break down . As one interviewee said: "You look at your closest friends and ask: are they informants?" This is what real fear of surveillance looks like: not knowing whom to trust, choosing your words with care when talking politics in public, the unpredictability of state power.

A2 Getting Better Woman in Islam are treated like second class citizens. The way Islam is practiced has as gone as far as to say that women are worth half of a men. They’re even less than ¾ as slaves were ruled. Beyer, 2K1 (Lisa, Beyer served as Time bureau chief in Jerusalem[2] for much of the time between the two Persian Gulf Wars. In 2000, she left Jerusalem to begin working in New York as a Senior Editor for TIME magazine.[1],Nov. 25, “Women of Islam”, http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,185647,00.html)//tamara&twemchen

For his day, the Prophet Muhammad was a feminist. The doctrine he laid out as the revealed word of God considerably improved the status of women in 7th century Arabia. In local pagan society, it was the custom to bury alive unwanted female newborns; Islam prohibited the practice. Women had been treated as possessions of their husbands; Islamic law made the education of girls a sacred duty and gave women the right to own and inherit property. Muhammad even decreed that sexual satisfaction was a woman's entitlement. He was a liberal at home as well as in the pulpit. The Prophet darned his own garments and among his wives and concubines had a trader, a warrior, a leatherworker and an imam.

Of course, ancient advances do not mean that much to women 14 centuries later if reform is, rather than a process, a historical blip subject to reversal. While it is impossible, given their diversity, to paint one picture of women

living under Islam today, it is clear that the religion has been used in most Muslim countries not to liberate but to entrench inequality . The Taliban, with its fanatical subjugation of the female sex, occupies an extreme, but it nevertheless belongs on a continuum that includes, not so far down the line, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan and the relatively moderate states of Egypt and Jordan. Where Muslims have afforded women the greatest degree of equality--in Turkey--they have done so by overthrowing Islamic precepts in favor of

secular rule. As Riffat Hassan, professor of religious studies at the University of Louisville, puts it, "The way Islam has been practiced in most Muslim societies for centuries has left millions of Muslim women with battered bodies, minds and souls." Part of the problem dates to Muhammad. Even as he proclaimed new rights for women, he enshrined their inequality in immutable law, passed down as God's commandments and eventually recorded in scripture. The Koran allots daughters half the inheritance of sons. It decrees that a woman's testimony in court, at least in financial matters, is worth half that of a man's . Under Shari'a, or Muslim law,

compensation for the murder of a woman is half the going rate for men . In many Muslim countries, these directives are incorporated into contemporary law. For a woman to prove rape in Pakistan, for example, four adult males of "impeccable" character must witness the penetration, in accordance with Shari'a.Family law in Islamic countries generally follows the prescriptions of scripture. This is so even in a country like Egypt, where much of the legal code has been secularized. In Islam, women can have only one spouse, while men are

permitted four. The legal age for girls to marry tends to be very young. Muhammad's favorite wife, A'isha, according to her biographer, was six when they wed, nine when the marriage was consummated. In Iran the legal age for marriage is nine for girls, 14 for boys. The law has occasionally been exploited by pedophiles, who marry poor young girls from the provinces, use and then abandon them. In 2000 the Iranian Parliament voted to raise the minimum age for girls to 14, but this year, a legislative oversight body dominated by traditional clerics vetoed the move. An attempt by conservatives to abolish Yemen's legal minimum age of 15 for girls failed, but local experts say it is rarely

enforced anyway. (The onset of puberty is considered an appropriate time for a marriage to be consummated.)Wives in Islamic societies face great difficulty in suing for divorce, but husbands can be released from their vows virtually on demand, in some places merely by saying "I divorce you" three times . Though in most Muslim states, divorces are entitled to alimony, in Pakistan it lasts only three months, long enough to ensure the woman isn't pregnant. The same three-month rule applies even to the Muslim minority in India. There, a national law provides for long-term alimony, but to appease Islamic conservatives, authorities

exempted Muslims. Fear of poverty keeps many Muslim women locked in bad marriages, as does the prospect of

losing their children. Typically, fathers win custody of boys over the age of six and girls after the onset of puberty. Maryam, an Iranian woman, says she has stayed married for 20 years to a philandering opium addict she does not love because she fears losing guardianship of her teenage daughter. "Islam supposedly gives me the right to divorce," she says. "But what about my rights afterward?"Women's rights are compromised further by a section in the Koran, sura 4:34, that has been interpreted to say that men have "pre-eminence" over women or that they are "overseers" of women. The verse goes on to say that the husband of an insubordinate wife should first admonish her, then leave her

to sleep alone and finally beat her. Wife beating is so prevalent in the Muslim world that social workers who assist battered women in Egypt, for example, spend much of their time trying to convince victims that their husbands' violent acts are unacceptable.

A2 K = Islamophobic Even if limited experiences don’t speak to the structural truth of Islam, they reveal personal struggles we have to recognize– it’s the same reason your authors that reveal the stories of individual Muslim Americans is key to breaking down the Surveillance StateKundnani, 14—professor at New York University (Arun, 3/28/14, "No NSA reform can fix the American Islamophobic surveillance complex", The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/28/nsa-reform-american-islamophobic-surveillance-complex)//twemchen

Better oversight of the sprawling American national security apparatus may finally be coming: President Obama and the House Intelligence Committee unveiled plans this week to reduce bulk collection of telephone records. The debate opened up by Edward

Snowden's whistle-blowing is about to get even more legalistic than all the parsing of hops and stores and metadata. These reforms may be reassuring, if sketchy. But for those living in so-called " suspect communities " – Muslim Americans, left-wing campaigners, "radical" journalists – the days of living on the receiving end of excessive spying won’t end there. How come when we talk about spying we don't talk about the lives of ordinary people being spied upon? While we have been rightly outraged at the government's

warehousing of troves of data, we have been less interested in the consequences of mass surveillance for those most affected by it – such as Muslim Americans. In writing my book on Islamophobia and the War on Terror, I spoke to dozens of Muslims,

from Michigan to Texas and Minnesota to Virginia. Some told me about becoming aware their mosque was under surveillance only

after discovering an FBI informant had joined the congregation. Others spoke about federal agents turning up at colleges to question[ing] every student who happened to be Muslim . All of them said they felt unsure whether their

telephone calls to relatives abroad were wiretapped or whether their emails were being read by government officials. There were the young Somali Americans in Minnesota who described how they and their friends were questioned by FBI agents for no reason other than their ethnic background. Some had been placed under surveillance by a local police department , which disguised its spying as a youth mentoring program and then passed the FBI intelligence on Somali-American political opinions. There were the Muslim students at the City University of New York who discovered that fellow students they had befriended had been informants all along, working for the New York Police Department's Intelligence Division and tasked with surveilling them. There was no reasonable suspicion of any crime; it was enough that the targeted students were active in the Muslim Students Association. And then there was Luqman Abdullah, a Detroit-based African-American imam, whose mosque was infiltrated by the FBI, leading to a 2009 raid in which he was shot and killed by federal agents. The government had no evidence of any terrorist plot; the sole pretext was that Abdullah had strongly critical views of the US government. These are the types of people whom the National Security Agency can suspect of being two "hops" away from targets. These are the types of "bad guys" referred to by outgoing NSA

director Keith Alexander. Ten years ago, around 100,000 Arabs and Muslims in America had some sort of national security file compiled on them. Today, that number is likely to be even higher. A study published last year by the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition documented the effects of this kind of mass

surveillance. In targeted communities, a culture of enforced self-censorship takes hold and relationships of trust start to break down . As one interviewee said: "You look at your closest friends and ask: are they informants?" This is what real fear of surveillance looks like: not knowing whom to trust, choosing your words with care when talking politics in public, the unpredictability of state power.

A2 Not All Islam!Islam oppresses women and instills a society of gender inequality—this must be evaluated before the pervasive surveillance system—or else the women’s struggles will never be evaluatedAli, 7—a fellow of the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and founder of the AHA Foundation (Ayaan Hirshi, 8/2/7,

“Infidel” pg.347-348)//tamara&twemchen

Death lures many others to take their own lives in order to escape a dismal reality. For many women, because of the perception of lost honor, death comes at the hands of a father, brother, or husband . Death comes to young women giving birth to new life, leaving the new born orphaned in the hands of strangers.For those who live in anarchy and civil war, as in the country of my birth, Somalia, death is everywhere.When I was born, my mother initially thought death had taken me away. But it didn't. When I got malaria and pneumonia, I recovered. When my genitals were cut, the wound healed. When a bandit held a knife to my throt, he decided not to slit it. When my Quran teacher frac tured my skull, the doctor who treated me kept death at bay.Even with bodyguards and death threats I feel privileged to be alive and free. When I took the train to Amsterdam thirteen years ago, I took a chance at a life in freedom, a life in which I would be free from bondage to someone I had not chosen, and in which my mind, too, could be free. I first encountered the full strength oflslam as a young child in Saudi Arabia. It was very different from the diluted religion of my grand mother, which was mixed with magical practices and pre-Islamic beliefs. Saudi Arabia is the source of Islam and its quintessence. It is the place where the Muslim religion is practiced in its purest form, and it is the origin of much of the fundamentalist vision that has, in my lifetime, spread far beyond its borders. In

Saudi Arabia, every breath, every step we took, was infused with concepts of purity or sinning, and with fear. Wishful thinking about the peaceful tolerance of lslam cannot interpret away this reality: hands are still cut off, women still stoned and enslaved , just as the Prophet Muhammad decided centuries ago. The kind of thinking I saw in Saudi Arabia, and among the Muslim Brotherhood in Kenya and Somalia, is incompatible with human rights and liberal values. It preserves a feudal mind-set based on tribal concepts of honor and shame. It rests on self- deception, hypocrisy, and double standards. It relies on the technological advances of the West while pre tending to ignore their origin in Western thinking. This mind-set makes the transition to modernity very painful for all who practice Islam.It is always difficult to

make the transition to a modern world. It was difficult for my grandmother, and for all my relatives from the miye. It was difficult for me, too. I moved from the world of faith to the world of reason-from the world of excision and forced marriage to the world348of

sexual emancipation. Having made that journey, I know that one of those worlds is simply better than the other.

Not because of its flashy gadgets, but fundamentally, because of its values. The. message of this book if it must

have a message, is that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.People accuse me of having interiorized a feeling of racial inferiority, so that I attack my own culture out of self-hatred, because I want to be white. This is a tiresome argument. Tell me, is freedom then

only for white people? Is it self-love to adhere to my ancestors' traditions and mutilate my daughters? To agree to be humiliated and powerless? To watch passively as my countrymen abuse women and slaughter each other in pointless disputes? When I came to a new culture, where I saw for the first time that human relations

could be different, would it have been self-love to see that as a foreign cult, which Muslims are forbidden to practice? Life is better in Europe than it is in the Muslim world because human relations are better , and one reason human relations

are better is that in the West, life on earth is valued in the here and now, and individuals enjoy rights and freedoms that are recognized and protected by the state. To accept subordination and abuse because Allah willed it-that, for me, would be self-hatred.The decision to write this book didn't come to me easily. Why would I expose such private memories to the world? I don't want my arguments to be considered sacrosanct because I have had horrible experiences; I haven't. In reality, my life has been marked by enormous good fortune. How many girls born in Digfeer Hospital in Mogadishu in November 1969 are even alive today? And how many have a real voice?I also don't want my reasoning to be dismissed as the bizarre ranting of someone

who has been somehow damaged by her experiences and who is lashing out. People often imply that I am angry because I was excised, or because my father married me of£ They never fail to add that such things are rare in the modern Muslim world. The fact is that hundreds of millions of women around the world live in forced

marriages, and six thousand small girls are excised every day. My excision in no way damaged my mental capacities; and I would like to be judged on the validity of my arguments, not as a victim. My central, motivating concern is that women, in Islam are oppressed.

A2 Not Just Islam as a victim. My central, motivating concern is that women, in Islam are oppressed.

Not all cultures are equal—Fundamentalist Islam teachings oppress women and are under-developed Ali, 7—a fellow of the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and founder of the AHA Foundation (Ayaan Hirshi, 8/2/7,

“Infidel” pg. 295-296)//tamara&twemchen

I wanted Muslim women to become more aware of just how bad, and how unacceptable, their suffering was. I wanted to help them develop the vocabulary of resistance.I Iwas inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist thinker who told women they had the same abilility to reason as men did and deserved the same rights. Even after she

published A Vindication of the Rights of Women, it too more-than a century before the suffragettes marched for the vote. I knew that freeing Muslim women from their mental cage would take time , too. I didn't expect immediate waves of organized support

among Muslim women. People who are conditioned to meekness, almost to the point where they have no mind of their own sadly have no ability to organize or will to express their opinions nen Iworked at the Labor Party

think tank, trying to talk about theseissues, people always accused me of failing to back up my arguments with data. But hard numbers were completely unavailable. When I tried to find out about honor killings, for instance--how many girls were killed every year in Holland by their fathers and brothers because of their precious family honor--civil servants at the Ministry of Justice would tell me 'We don't register murders based on that category of motivation it would stigmatize one group in society." The Dutch

government counted the number of drug-related killings and traffic accidents year, but not the number of honor killings, because no Dutch wanted to recognize that this kind of murder happened on a regular basis .Even Amnesty International didn't keep statistics on how women around the world were victims of honor killings. They could tell you how many men were imprisoned and tortured, but they couldn’t keep tabs on the number of women flogged in public for fornication or executed for adultery. That wasn't their subject.I

decided that if l were to become a member of the Dutch Parliament it would become my holy mission to have these statistics registered. I wanted someone, somewhere, to take note every time a man in Holand murdered his child simply because she had a boyfriend. I wanted someone to register domestic violence by ethnic background - and abuse, and

incest-and to investigate the number of excisions of little girls that took place every year on Dutch kitchen tables.

Once these figures were clear, the facts alone would shock the country. With one stroke, they would eliminate the complacent attitude of moral relativist who claimed that all cultures are equal . The excuse that nobody knew would be removed.Ifl were in Parliament, I could try to act on my beliefs, notjust them. And Neelie was right: although the Labor Party had c seem the right party for me, and although I was truly loyal to Paul and Job Cohen, many things about me had never fit with Labor's · Social democracy is grounded in the rights of groups of peop individuals. The Liberal Par may not have been as ci:.ddl as · its hiloso hy was grounded in the values of ersonal freedo ideas felt comfortable there.I was a one-issue politician, I decided. I am still. I am also co that this is the largest,

most important issue that our society an. planet will face in this century. Every society that is still in the rigid grip of lslam oppresses women and also lags behind in development . Most these societies are poor; many are full of conflict and war. Socities that respect the rights of women and their freedom are wealthy and peaceful .I decided I would go wherever I had the ;t ability to effect ,Ifthe Liberal Party was offering me a platform to stand on, then so . I phoned Paul Kalma and told him I would be leaving both the · Party and my job.

A2 Perm The 1AC’s unquestioning endorsement of Islam is another form of oppression of women—we must first re-evaluate the context of the Quran to contemporary politics and gender equality instead of combating IslamophobiaAli, 7—a fellow of the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and founder of the AHA Foundation (Ayaan Hirshi, 8/2/7,

“Infidel” pg.313-314)//tamara&twemchen

In the film Theo and I made, Submission: Part One, is first and foremost about the relation of the individual with Allah. In Islam, unlike in

Christianity and Judaism, the relationship of the individual to God is one of total submission , slave to master. To Muslims, worship of God means total obedience to Allah's rules and total abstinence from the thoughts and deeds

that He has declared forbidden in the Quran. To modernize Islam and adapt it to contemporary ideals would require a dialogue with God, even disagreement with God's rules; but as Islam is conceived, any kind of dis agreement with Allah is insolence because it assumes equality with Him. The Quran tells a vivid story about how Satan was expelled from the realm of angels after Allah created Adam. Allah ordered all the angels to bow to Adam, put Satan refused to obey. He talked back to Allah: Why should he, an elevated angel, bow down to a creature made of mud? Allah threw Satan out of Paradise, and from then on Satan has tried to lure Adam and his offspring from the Straight Path. For a human being to doubt any of Allah's rules is to fall into

Satan's clutches.Probably every Muslim is taught that story, and as a child I thought of it often. Now, as an adult, I felt that liberation of Muslim women must be preceded by liberation of the mind from this rigid, dogmatic obedience to Allah's dictates. Allah is constantly referred to in the Quran as "the most compassionate, the most merciful"; He also says several times that he has given us a will of our own. In that case, I wonder, why would He mind a little debate?When I sat down to write the script for our film, I decided to use the format of prayer to bring about dialogue with Allah. I pictured a woman standing in the center of a room. In the four corners of the room, four women depict restrictive verses from the Quran. The woman in the mid dle of the room is veiled, but her veil is transparent at the front, opaque· at the back. The transparency is necessary because it challenges Allah to look at what he created: the body of woman. On her torso is written the opening verse of the Quran, the "Sura Fatiha," which every Muslim is required to recite first, at every prayer:In the name of God, the merciful, the beneficent.Praise be to God, the Lord of the worlds, the merciful, the beneficent, ruler of the day ofjudgment!Thee we serve and Thee we ask for aid.Guide us in the right path, the path of those to whom Thou art gracious; not of those with

whom Thou art wroth; nor of those who err.314 The woman observes the rules of prayer: her head is lowered and her gaze is fixed on the front of the mat, where she will place her forehead: when she bows to express total obedience. But after she recites the Suro.Fatiha, she does something unusual: she raises her head. The camera to the first woman, who tells Allah that she has obeyed all his injuncti but she now lies in a corner, bleeding. She has fallen in love, and for she has been flogged. She ends, very simply, with the sentence, "I may longer submit."Another of the women is repelled by the odor of her husband. She • been forced to marry him and now is forced to submit to him sefor the Quran says, Whenyour wives have purified themselves, ye may ap them in

any manner, time orplace. A third woman is beaten by her husband at least once a week : As to those women on whose

part you fear dislO'}'alty andconduct, admonish them, scourge them and banish them to beds apart. A fourth a young girl who lives

cloistered in her own home. She has been raped her uncle, and now she is pregnant; she will be punished for having outside marriage. I called the film Submission, Part One, because submission to Islam causes many other kinds of suffering. I saw this as the first in a series films that would tackle the master-slave relationship of God and individual. My message was that the Quran is an act of man, not God. We should be free to interpret it; we should be permitted to apply it to the modern era in a different way, instead of performing painful contortions to try to recreate the circumstances of a horrible distant past. My intention was to liberate Muslim minds so that Muslim women Muslim men, too-might be freer. Men, too, are forced to obey i mane laws.It was a simple film to make. Theo wasn't interested in writing up p posals for grants and subsidies: he said we should just make a ten-n;iin film and see what happened. I finished the script at the end of ] Theo rented a studio and hired an actress and a makeup woman, and '·few props.We did discuss the danger of making a film with this message. Ha · already spoken out about Islam, I knew how dangerous it was. I w Theo; I wanted him to keep his name off the project. But Theo c himself the village idiot. He said, "Nobody shoots the village idiot." believed that I was the one who would be attacked, and nobody woulcl bother with him.The movie almost didn't happen.

“Islamophobia” Word PIC

1nc ______ and I advocated the entirety of the first affirmative constructive without their use of the word ‘Islamophobia.’ The usage of the term ‘Islamophobia’ is inappropriate, undermines anti-semitism, causes homogenization and essentialism, hinders freedom of expression, and generalizes the concept of Islam based oppressionLorente 10 (Javier Rosón Lorente, PhD. in Social Anthropology from the University of Granada and is currently researcher at Casa Árabe e Instituto Internacional de Estudios Árabes y del Mundo Musulmán (Spain). Discrepancies Around the Use of the Term “Islamophobia”, The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science, HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, VIII, 2, FALL 2010, 115-128)//ASMITH

As mentioned above, there is another order of criticism or discrepancy toward the term Islamophobia, which though fully linked to ethnic, religious and cultural aspects, is in itself used as individual criticism over the use of this terminology. Such is firstly the case of ‘etymological/ terminological criticism.’ From this viewpoint, the terms ‘anti-Muslim racism,’ ‘anti- Arab’ or even ‘intolerance against Muslims’ 18 are clearer than the term Islamophobia for various reasons. On the one hand, use of the word ‘phobia’ in the concept is not considered appropriate, as it would imply the existence of a sort of mental illness (phobia: obsessive aversion to someone or something and/or compulsive irrational fear); on the other, the term Islamophobia is not considered ‘ideal,’ for there is no specific rejection of Islam as a religion, but rather a rejection of Muslim individuals or collectives or those defined as such. This kind of criticism even makes an analogy between the word Islamophobia and the word ‘anti-Semitism,’ arguing that from a grammatical standpoint anti-Semitism should signify a prejudice against Semitic peoples in general, even though it is exclusively used to refer to hostility against the Jews. In this regard, the grammatically incorrect Islamophobia would require the 150 years which the term ‘anti-Semitism’ needed to become grammatically acceptable, except that Jews recognize themselves and are recognized as being a single ethnic group, contrary to the case of Muslims.

Parallel to this, inclusion of the word ‘Islam’ in the word Islamophobia raises another kind of discrepancy: based on an undeniable question, the religious, racial, cultural and ethnic diversity of the groups ‘supposedly’ the object of Islamophobia, the term Islamophobia homogenizes everything associated to Islam and therefore to Muslims. In this homogenization process the diversity of communities and individuals is essentialized, and distinct and differentiated processes are eventually included in a same concept. It is held in turn that widespread use of the term Islamophobia by distinct communities may also essentialize internal plurality at local, regional, national and international level. Other terms which semantically attempt to approach the national particularities or ‘realities’ (besides the more extended ‘anti-Arab anti-Muslim racism’) are becoming alternative though critical lines vis-à-vis usage of the term Islamophobia. For example ‘Islamfeindichkeit’ in the German context literally means hostility to Islam, or its rejection, but not phobia in the sense of fear, or ‘maurofobia/morofobia’ in the Spanish case.

Second, we should look at ‘criticism’ linked to the ‘identity-building process’ which initially does not reject use of the term, but does question the generalization and value of same, as well as its ability to describe the social reality in a non-essentialized manner. This criticism is meant to show both the use

and abuse of a terminology— Islamophobia—which we ourselves have constructed. This identity-building presumes that the term Islamophobia is not put up in a ‘one-way’ manner addressed to Muslim communities and/or individuals, but rather that the prejudice we are dealing with is very likely two-way. According to this thesis, the term Islamophobia is not complete, given that to understand it we should delve into the contemporary public discussion regarding ‘Islam’ and ‘West,’ and also delimit the confusing ‘inter-relational’ debate being generated. From this point of view both sides have a tendency to essentialize from the ‘Muslim’ and ‘Western’ standpoint both the Muslim population and the rest of the non- Muslim population. On the one hand there is widespread social ‘alarmism’ based on the ‘threat’ of how Islam presents the Western world19, and on the other, how from the West20 it is presented to Muslims. The ‘simplification’ from the West’s viewpoint involves a number of prejudices regarding many aspects associated to the world around Islam: to think that all (or most) Muslims are terrorists; to consider widespread the ‘degree of aggressiveness’ disseminated by news media with respect to Arab countries; to think that the universal denial of human rights encompasses the whole Arab world; and to think that the billion Muslims, their social and ethnic groups, are all the same. Likewise and bilaterally there is a process of essentialization by Muslims vis-à-vis the West—the a priori Muslim ‘simplification’ of a comprehensive and uniform ‘West,’ along with the stereotyped idea of a single unitary and universal Muslim identity extended to all Muslims, their holy texts and their culture21. In this regard, before the distinct processes of Western social and religious intolerance, processes whose tangible result is seen in conflicts which reject the ‘other’ and are in turn the root of Islamophobia, an endless number of responses to social exclusion have been generated, such as signs of power loss and de-structuring of the bases of identitary thought, beyond the ‘hardening’ of Western ideological postures and the root of the very concept of Islamophobia.

Thirdly, we encounter criticism or discrepancies which consider use of the term Islamophobia to be unmerited, along with its respective symbolic burden, as it ‘hinders’ the freedom of expression of certain sectors and/or social players. This debate initially emerged as criticism of the Runnymede Trust report. Those who currently hold up the lack of freedom of expression to justify the insistence or imprecision of the term Islamophobia make biased use of the sectors, Muslim or not: for example, the Mohammed caricatures controversy (2005), the film Fitna (by Dutch far-right MP Geert Wilders) or the theatre play The Satanic Verses using the book of the same title by Salman Rushdie, which opened in Germany on 30 March 2008, etc. These and other social players hold that the charge of Islamophobia hampers their freedom of expression. They ironically point to the ‘freedom of expression’ enjoyed by people who want to condemn or denounce discourses and acts, such as the ‘Islamophobia Award’ granted by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, a British organization. On this point, we must note that freedom of expression, albeit vital for democratic life, should not be deemed an absolute universal value. It should be wielded within established legal frameworks and under the appropriate ethical and legal responsibility of the different social players involved. This means that Islamophobic speeches cannot be justified through recourse to the protection of fundamental rights.22 In fourth and last place we should take into account differences regarding the term Islamophobia in the framework of ‘ideological discourse.’ This criticism is grounded in the eagerness of researchers and/or academics to demonstrate that Islamophobia exists in the society they are studying; they go so far as to generalize and make universal considerations with no criteria whatsoever regarding both the phenomenon and the distinct readings associated to same. This generalization causes the term Islamophobia to lose its original meaning, distorting the observed reality. From this point of view criticism is addressed to our inability to differentiate between discourse and practice—at the level of discourse not everything can or

should be called Islamophobia. This implies veiled criticism of how the term Islamophobia has grouped such a variety of forms of discourse and acts, aiming to show that any act marked as Islamophobic proceeds from a same ideological core23, which has distorted and/or lost its original meaning. This ‘criticism’ aims to show that indiscriminate use of this terminology is not positive and that ‘not all Islamophobic acts or incidents are Islamophobia.’ To avoid this ‘generalization,’ it holds that all the observable and related nuances of acts marked as Islamophobic must be studied in depth, as it would be wrong to have to choose between Islamophobia or ‘nothing.’ To that end, it proposes distinguishing, per national specificity, between academic discussions about Islam and modernity; public debates about whether Islam recognizes the principle of separation of church and state; the public clamour which essentializes Islam; and the forms of inciting hatred, such as discourse associated to the death of Theo van Gogh, etc.

This is a pre-requisite to effectively challenging anti-Muslim violence Edvardsson 08 (Linda Edvardsson, “Islamophobia – Features of Islamophobia and Strategies against it” Malmö University Department of International Migration and Ethnic Relations IMER 91-120 Fall 2008 Master Thesis)

There is ultimately a need to address Islamophobia; both on a social level and also within a legal discourse and this need have descriptively been told by two imams alongside a theoretical foundation. The imams have demonstrated that ‘bad news’ and negative images are in fact causing more disfavour than what everyday life might do. The media can therefore become a dual force in which negative images are flourishing and being rooted, yet at the same time a constitution that can cause the opposite. This relationship is depending on which news that is more favoured in that given time and/or place that one is referring to. In Sweden it has been demonstrated through both the imam’s voices and a theoretical framework that Islamophobia is not so obvious and a prominent feature in everyday life, rather, lies beneath the surface and are characterised in Swedish media. Yet, mental and physical damage cannot be excluded.168 For instance, one of the imams stated that it is always a struggle to tell the truth about Islam and also mentioned the segregation within Swedish labour market and housing. The imam also spoke of the importance of what is prioritised by the police and other authorities and that this eventually decides if, how and when Islamaphobia can be prevented and eliminated.169 Both the imams did not identify that Islamophobia is so apparent in Sweden, in contrast to other countries. Yet underline that Islamophobia could have crucial effects on both Muslims and the society in general. For instance, they both mention the incident with the Danish newspaper and media’s role whereas Muslims ought not to react against these kinds of things, instead work as good ambassadors or good employees.170 One of the imams mentioned that there are differences between those acts against Islam itself and those acts that are against the Muslims.171 Hitherto, this research mainly underlined the phobia against the religious practice rather than ‘the ethnic phobia’; although, the need to address Islamophobia must maybe start with a separation between what we mean with the concept Islamophobia. In order to address more specifically the acts that is carried out. Higher attention must therefore be drawn to if Islamophobic acts are anticipated against one’s ethnic or religious belonging. Ergo a separation must maybe be realised, before Islamophobia can be solved. In this manner, an extension of Islamophobia such as, Muslimophobia might be plausible as it depicts a phobia against one’s ethnic belonging. This phobia might reveal a fear or hostility against Muslim culture, countries, lifestyles, traits etcetera. This extension of Islamophobia, Muslimophobia, can perhaps make it easier to erase some misunderstandings thus easier being decreased and grasped which methods that ought

to be used more specifically. After all, within the racialisation process it can be evident that the religion Islam and its various ethnic followers are categorised as one group and/or one identity. It also portrays a discourse in which all groups become homogenous and static hence neglect perspectives that sees ethnicity and culture as dynamic elements. Strategies and efforts against Muslimophobia can therefore reduce influences and stereotypes caused by, for instance, the essentialist view. This also emphasises the need to divide what the struggle is against more detailed. Then it might be easier to solve those effects caused by Islamophobia and implement new laws that react against it more effectively. After all, Karaman revealed experiences where some situations had been hard to interpret as Islamophobia or a dangerous and reckless game by some teenagers; as misunderstandings can easily cause more damage than good. However, clearly it has been verified that there is a need to address Islamophobia both within the media, the labour market, housing, medical care, schools and so forth. Most importantly, as the imams also declared, it is maybe time to embrace and highlight the positive attributes of Islam and the Muslim population instead of always doing the opposite.

2nc Islam K NB Labeling discussion of terror as ‘Islamophobic’ stifles discourse about terrorism and problematic parts of extremismSpencer 11 (Robert Spencer. “A Response to Matt Duss: A Defamation By Any Other Name.” October 19, 2011. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/280529/response-matt-duss-defamation-any-other-name-robert-spencer)//EMerz

Indicative of Matt Duss’s dishonesty in his response to the article I co-wrote with David Horowitz about the manipulative neologism “Islamophobia” is his initial labeling of us as “anti-Muslim activists” and his characterization of our work as “the dissemination of hateful anti-Muslim ideas.” This appellation is not only inaccurate; it is highly defamatory, as it is intended to mislead Duss’s readers into assuming that we oppose a group of people out of sheer racism or bigotry, rather than opposing a radically intolerant and oppressive ideology. In reality, neither David Horowitz nor I are “anti-Muslim,” as I have stated many times. It is neither “anti-Muslim” nor “hateful” to stand for human rights for all people, including Muslims, and to defend the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and equality of rights for women, all of which are denied under traditional forms of sharia. Duss claims that we are part of “an organized campaign to spread misinformation about the religious faith of millions of Americans” — while denying that he is “peddling ‘conspiracy theories’” about us. He makes much of the fact that the reliably Leftist Anti-Defamation League has smeared us also, asking rhetorically, “Should the Anti-Defamation League also be lumped among the ‘jihadist apologists’?” Why not? Why should it be surprising that an organization that consistently follows a far-Left political line would follow it in this also? Above all, like the CAP report itself, Duss does not and cannot provide any evidence either that an “organized campaign to spread misinformation” exists, or that anything that Horowitz or I or any of the other targeted “Islamophobes” have said is false. He does try, however. He quotes, as if it is self-evidently false, my statement that Islam “is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers,” but offers no refutation of it. If Duss can produce evidence of another major world religion with a developed doctrine or tradition of warfare against unbelievers (the Crusades, for those who may wish to toss them in here, did not proceed on the basis of any such Christian doctrine; no sect of Christianity ever taught as a matter of faith that believers were obligated to make war upon unbelievers), or that the sects of Islam and schools of Islamic law do not contain such developed doctrines and traditions, I will duly retract. But with Al-Azhar University, the most prestigious institution in Sunni Islam, endorsing (as conforming “to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community”) a manual of Islamic law that declares that Muslims must wage war “upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians . . . until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax,” Duss may find such a refutation rough going. Duss shows a similar lack of knowledge of Islamic doctrine and law when he attempts to refute my statement that “there is no form of sharia that does not contain . . . [the] death penalty for apostasy” by asserting that I am “obviously ignorant of the manner in which Islam is practiced by millions of sharia-adherent Muslims in the United States.” The ignorance is his: more Muslims in the U.S. do not adhere to sharia in its fullness, as no less an authority than the Ground Zero Mosque imam Faisal Abdul Rauf recently affirmed when he said that “the only truly clashing area” between Islamic law and modern Western society “is the penal code, and no Muslim has the intention of introducing that to America.” So if Rauf affirms that Muslims in America do not adhere to the sharia penal code, and Duss affirms that Muslims in America are “sharia-adherent,” whom should we believe? I

will go with the internationally renowned imam over the non-Muslim Leftist ideologue, thank you. And as for whether or not there is actually a form of sharia, that is, a school of Islamic jurisprudence, that does not teach that apostates deserve death, I challenge Duss to find it. But he will search in vain. Duss then claims that “the unmistakable implication of these claims is that all observant Muslims should be viewed with suspicion simply by virtue of being observant Muslims,” and that “that’s obviously Islamophobic.” In reality, the unmistakable implication of these facts is only that there are aspects of traditional Islamic law that are incompatible with constitutional values. Here again, Rauf himself says nothing less. Is he, too, an “Islamophobe”? In concluding his new smear piece, Duss complains that National Review published our article in the first place, and pleads that we be read out of honorable American conservatism. Here he exposes his real agenda in all its ugliness. Duss’s Center for American Progress, the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and other leftist and Islamic-supremacist groups are conducting an ongoing campaign to discredit and marginalize everyone who dares to stand up against the jihad and Islamic supremacism. They are bent on destroying every last individual who does not adopt a warmly positive stance toward the spread of sharia in the West and all other manifestations of the advancing jihad. The stakes are very high. If we don’t resist this Islamic supremacist thuggery, Duss and his Islamic-supremacist allies will succeed in stamping out all discussion of the truth about Islam and jihad, thereby rendering us mute and defenseless before its advance. That’s why we have to resist now, at every step, and continue to expose this propagandistic “Islamophobia” campaign.

2nc Language FirstYour first question should be the way that language is used – it’s the most concrete, immediate way to target and challenge oppression Collins and Glover 2 (John Collins, Ass. Prof. of Global Studies at St. Lawrence, and Ross Glover, Visiting Professor of Sociology at St. Lawrence University, 2002, Collateral Language, p. 6-7, The Real Effects of Language)

As any university student knows, theories about the “social construction” and social effects of language have become a common feature of

academic scholarship. Conservative critics often argue that those who use these theories of language (e.g.,

deconstruction) are “just” talking about language, as opposed to talking about the “real world.” The essays in this book,

by contrast, begin from the premise that language matters in the most concrete , im mediate way possible: its use, by political and military leaders, leads directly to violence in the form of war, mass murder (in cluding genocide), the physical destruction of human commu nities, and the devastation of the natural environment. Indeed, if the world ever witnesses a nuclear holocaust, it will probably be because leaders in

more than one country have succeeded in convincing their people , through the use of political language, that the use of nuclear weapons and, if necessary, the destruction of the earth itself, is justifiable . From our

perspective, then, every act of political violence—from the horrors perpetrated against Native Americans to the murder of political

dissidents in the Soviet Union to the destruction of the World Trade Center, and now the bombing of Afghanistan—is intimately linked with the use of language . Partly what we are talking about here, of course, are the processes of “manufacturing consent” and shaping people’s per ception of the world around them ; people are more likely to sup port acts of violence committed in their name if the recipients of the violence have been defined as “terrorists,” or if the violence is presented as a defense of “freedom.” Media analysts such as Noam Chomsky have written eloquently about the corrosive effects that this kind of process has on the political culture of supposedly democratic societies. At the

risk of stating the obvious, however, the most fundamental effects of violence are those that are visited upon the objects of violence; the language that shapes public opinion is the same language that burns villages, besieges entire populations, kills and maims human bodies, and leaves the ground scarred with bomb craters and littered with land mines. As George Orwell so famously illustrated in his work, acts of vio lence can easily be made more palatable through the use of eu phemisms such as “pacification” or, to use an example discussed in this book, “targets.”

It is important to point out, however, that the need for such language derives from the simple fact that the violence itself is abhorrent. Were it not for the abstract language of “vital interests” and “surgical strikes” and the flattering lan - guage of “civilization” and ‘just” wars, we would be less likely to avert our mental gaze from the physical effects of violence.

2nc S WallWe’ll isolate 8 reasons why the word ‘Islamophobia’ is bad—any of them outweighs the solvency deficit Richardson 12 (Robin Richardson, a director of the Insted consultancy. He was director of the Runnymede Trust, 1991–96, and editor of report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain)(“Islamophobia or anti-Muslim racism – or what? – concepts and terms revisited”, autumn 2012)//ASMITH

The disadvantages of the term Islamophobia are significant. Some of them are primarily about the echoes implicit in the concept of phobia. Others are about the implications of the term Islam. For convenience, they can be itemised as follows. 1. Medically, phobia implies a severe mental illness of a kind that affects only a tiny minority of people. Whatever else anxiety about Muslims may be, it is not merely a mental illness and does not merely involve a small number of people. 2. To accuse someone of being insane or irrational is to be abusive and, not surprisingly, to make them defensive and defiant. Reflective dialogue with them is then all but impossible. 3. To label someone with whom you disagree as irrational or insane is to absolve yourself of the responsibility of trying to understand, both intellectually and with empathy, why they think and act as they do, and of seeking through engagement and argument to modify their perceptions and understandings. 4. The concept of anxiety is arguably more useful in this context than the concept of phobia . It is widely recognised that anxiety may not be (though certainly may be) warranted by objective facts, for human beings can on occasions perceive dangers that do not objectively exist, or anyway do not exist to the extent that is imagined. Also it can sometimes be difficult to identify, and therefore to name accurately, the real sources of an anxiety. 5. The use of the word Islamophobia on its own implies that hostility towards Muslims is unrelated to, and basically dissimilar from, forms of hostility such as racism, xenophobia, sectarianism, and such as hostility to so-called fundamentalism (Samuels 2006). Further, it may imply there is no connection with issues of class, power, status and territory; or with issues of military, political or economic competition and conflict . 6 . The term implies there is no important difference between prejudice towards Muslim communities within one’s own country and prejudice towards cultures and regimes elsewhere in the world where Muslims are in the majority, and with which ‘the West’ is in military conflict or economic competition. 7. The term is inappropriate for describing opinions that are basically anti-religion as distinct from anti-Islam. ‘I am an Islamophobe,’ wrote the journalist Polly Toynbee in reaction to the Runnymede 1997 report, adding ‘… I am also a Christophobe. If Christianity were not such a spent force in this country, if it were powerful and dominant as it once was, it would still be every bit as damaging as Islam is in those theocratic states in its thrall… If I lived in Israel, I'd feel the same way about Judaism’ . 8. The key phenomenon to be addressed is arguably anti-Muslim hostility, namely hostility towards an ethno-religious identity within western countries (including Russia), rather than hostility towards the tenets or practices of a worldwide religion. The 1997 Runnymede definition of Islamophobia was ‘a shorthand way of referring to dread or hatred of Islam – and, therefore, to fear or dislike of all or most Muslims’. In retrospect, it would have been as accurate, or arguably indeed more accurate, to say ‘a shorthand way of referring to fear or dislike of all or most Muslims – and, therefore, dread or hatred of Islam’.

2nc Islam K NB Islamophobia studies squelch discussion about legitimately dangerous countries and silences Muslim activists- this rhetoric is what extremists want- lack of criticism sets Islam up for failureSchanzer 13 (Jonathan Schanzer. “A Nasty Neologism.” January 9, 2013. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324391104578227543258640614)//EMerz

"The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends," President George W. Bush declared soon after the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Bush's statement set the tone for the tumultuous decade to come, one in which the nation prosecuted a war on terrorism in two Muslim lands while taking great pains to protect the rights of Muslim Americans. Yet if the author Nathan Lean is to be believed, Americans today are caught in the grip of an irrational fear of Islam and its adherents. In his short book on the subject, Mr. Lean, a journalist and editor at the website Aslan Media, identifies this condition using the vaguely medical sounding term "Islamophobia." It is by now a familiar diagnosis, and an ever widening range of symptoms—from daring to criticize theocratic tyrannies in the Middle East to drawing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad—are attributed to it. In reality, Islamophobia is simply a pejorative neologism designed to warn people away from criticizing any aspect of Islam. Those who deploy it see no difference between Islamism—political Islam and its extremist offshoots—and the religion encompassing some 1.6 billion believers world-wide. Thanks to this feat of conflation, Islamophobia transforms religious doctrines and political ideologies into something akin to race; to be an "Islamophobe" is in some circles today tantamount to being a racist. American Islamophobia, Mr. Lean claims, is fomented by a "small cabal of xenophobes." "The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims" is less a book than a series of vignettes about some of these antagonists, who are "bent on scaring the public about Islam." His Islamophobic figures and institutions range from political leaders like Mr. Bush, Sen. John McCain and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who, Mr. Lean says, have "harnessed Muslims and Islam to terrorism"; to the pro-Israel community, which is alleged to be animated by a "violent faith narrative" and funded by magnates who inject "eye-popping cash flows into the accounts of various fear campaigns"; to pretty much everyone who campaigned in 2010 against the construction of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque near the site of the 9/11 attacks in lower Manhattan. Mr. Lean tars with the same brush the likes of the scholar Daniel Pipes and the Muslim activist, physician and U.S. Navy veteran Zuhdi Jasser. Mr. Pipes, the author writes, is "deeply entrenched in the business of selling fear." He portrays Dr. Jasser as a puppetlike figure, "a 'good Muslim,' one that openly and forcefully denounced various tenets of his faith." These are crude and uncharitable caricatures of these men. Mr. Pipes was one of the first Western commentators to raise the alarm about the subterranean spread of extremist attitudes in both the Middle East and among some Muslim communities in the West. Dr. Jasser, a devout Muslim, is the founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, an organization that advances the notion that "the purest practice of Islam is one in which Muslims have complete freedom to accept or reject any of the tenants or laws of the faith no different than we enjoy as Americans in this Constitutional republic." Both men argue that the real contest is the serious war of ideas raging within Islam itself, between the forces of liberalism and pluralism and those of obscurantism. To Mr. Lean, though, any such distinction is simply a false perception manufactured by Islamophobes. Thus the author fails to grapple with the fact that, unlike average Muslims, Islamist terror groups like al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah do commit unspeakable acts of violence in the name of Islam

—actions that surely help account for why many Americans (49%, according to a 2010 poll) hold an unfavorable view of Islam, even when they view favorably Muslims that they personally know. Mr. Lean also can't seem to tell the difference between Islamist organizations and ordinary Muslims. Consider his view of the Council on American Islamic Relations, a self-proclaimed civil-rights organization that wields outsize influence on questions of Muslim integration in the U.S. Mr. Lean barely mentions CAIR and, when he does, it is in invariably glowing terms. The author lauds "cooperation between the FBI and CAIR" that supposedly "led to the capture of five American Muslim men in Pakistan suspected of trying to join radical, anti-American forces." But he neglects to mention that CAIR was named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror-finance trial of 2007. The same group, according to an unclassified State Department cable, sought to raise $50 million for an Islamophobia campaign from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Islamist states and groups have been at the forefront of promoting the concept of Islamophobia. As far back as 1999, the United Association for Studies and Research, a group founded by Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook, published a book that purported to expose "The Truth Behind the Anti-Muslim Campaign in America." After 9/11, Muslim states mounted a campaign to characterize the fear of Muslim violence as blind hatred. In 2004, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan assured the world that U.N. "special rapporteurs continue to monitor the exercise and infringements of this right [freedom of religion], and to recommend ways to combat Islamophobia." According to anti-Islamophobia crusaders, though, even questioning the origins of the concept is itself a form of Islamophobia. Such dogmatism chills the crucial conversations that need to take place about Islamism here in the West . It also does a profound injustice to liberal Muslims around the world. After all, if Islam is dominated by its most violent and illiberal elements, and questioning these forces is deemed by intellectual elites to be a form of racism, then reform-minded Muslims really stand no chance.

A2 Defintions of Islamophobia Having one authors’ interp of islamophobia demonstrates the link, it doesn’t answer it – even your authors can’t agree on a common interpretation of what islamophobia is and what it means – i.e. Kumar describes it in terms of prejudice and Kundnani describes it as structural racism – this all just proves our arg that the word ‘Islamophobia’ is extremely broadLorente 10 (Javier Rosón Lorente, PhD. in Social Anthropology from the University of Granada and is currently researcher at Casa Árabe e Instituto Internacional de Estudios Árabes y del Mundo Musulmán (Spain). Discrepancies Around the Use of the Term “Islamophobia”, The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science, HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, VIII, 2, FALL 2010, 115-128)//ASMITH

Nowadays and as a result of the September 11, March 11 and June 7 attacks, the “circle has closed” vis-à-vis Western prejudices, greatly strengthening the “essentialist stigmatization of the Muslim world”2: the entire immigrant population living in neighbourhoods and cities has come to be identified and compared with ‘the terrorist,’ and a national and international alarmism has emerged, leading to the rejection of Muslim communities and anything associated to Islam. For this reason Muslims in Europe have been particularly liable to be targeted by diverse prejudices and stereotypes, gradually consolidating use of the term Islamophobia and hence Islamophobic acts. However, although the concept is increasingly widespread, it seems especially hard to define in practice just what Islamophobia is, as it is often put on a par with other processes such as racism (anti- Maghrebi, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, etc), hostility to Islam and xenophobia, etc., and confused with or likened to terms such as ‘Maurophobia,’ ‘Moorophobia’ or ‘Arabophobia.’ This has given way to a wavering definition, with no consensus as to either its definition or legal formulation, reaffirming both the emerging and changing social reality and the broad ignorance at different levels over what is taking place in our societies, regions and neighbourhoods, etc. Parallel to this a line of thinkers and academics has emerged3, who assert that use of the term Islamophobia is increasingly more controversial, given that it often serves to contain very diverse phenomena running from xenophobia to the fight against terrorism. Although the term mainly refers to instilled fear and/or hostility towards Islam, it also encompasses the practical consequences of such hostility visà- vis discrimination (both positive and negative), prejudices, discourse and the less favourable treatment of Muslim individuals and communities, and the exclusion of same from political/social mainstreams. In this article we shall deal with this sort of criticism and/or discrepancies around use of the term Islamophobia, though not without making clear that from our standpoint the term was coined because there is a new reality which needs a name. This reality must be described and defined, for objectively4 the prejudice against Muslims has grown considerably and so quickly and exponentially that in recent years a new term had to be coined into the vocabulary, able to identify and act against a wide range of acts and attitudes which particularly oppose the Arab and/or Muslim communities residing in Europe and the West.

The meaning of Islamophobia varies enormously Lorente 10 (Javier Rosón Lorente, PhD. in Social Anthropology from the University of Granada and is currently researcher at Casa Árabe e Instituto Internacional de Estudios Árabes y del Mundo Musulmán (Spain). Discrepancies Around the Use of the Term “Islamophobia”, The Omar Khayyam Center for

Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science, HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, VIII, 2, FALL 2010, 115-128)//ASMITH

Terms/concepts are theoretical constructions derived from a given reality which can capture and synthesize aspects of that reality. They can respond to social constructions resulting from processes of interaction among different individuals (their own identity and practices) or to his-toric constructions which in an adjustable manner are organized and modified in time and in space. Presumably we should understand the term Islamophobia to be a way to ‘read’ what is going on, a way to express the (current) reality and account for its practices. In other words, Islamophobia is a term/concept we have constructed to weld together a ‘universal container’ of social practices and meanings, regardless of the contextual conditions upon which those built until present have been based. These conditions are diverse in their ‘form and content,’ such as the different degrees of associationism, technical components, inclusion policies, specific and differentiated mass media treatment, etc. They encompass5 an infinite number of acts and attitudes which have no need to be highlighted or signified according to the daily logic of ‘minorities and majorities,’ but which are rather clear acts of exclusion and a broad state of ‘uncertainty’ centred especially on the more significant ‘other’ and currently and historically essentialized per the keys of what we take to be Islamophobia. Attacks (verbal, physical, on private property of the ‘other,’ etc.), negative stereotypes, mimesis and comments in the discourse of various social players, job discrimination, bureaucratic disregard and delay regarding the construction of mosques, prayer rooms and cemeteries, etc., and even the non-recognition of a distinctive identity, both ethnic and religious, are examples of what all too often happens in our societies with respect to a certain population—a minority ‘we’ identify as foreign (even if Spanish), Arab and/or Muslim. Although the term in both its ‘practical’ and theoretical facet seems objectively defined, as to what is or is not an “Islamophobic” act and/or attitude, it is nevertheless roundly criticized by some analysts/ academics due to its ambiguity and the scant consensus over its definition, and to its application or general acknowledgment. This non-definition gives rise to three main currents of criticism, mostly interrelated: religious, racial and ethno-cultural. There is also another order of criticism which can involve etymology, identity, politics, freedom of expression and ideological discourse, etc., which complete and/or complement the distinct discrepant lines around its use. To this criticism we must add differential and contextual aspects, many of which are wielded against ‘universal’ use of the term. Yet we must make clear a priori that the contextual importance—specifically regarding criticism addressed to use or not of the term Islamophobia—is relative from the moment that the basis for such discrimination, above all due to 9/11, has varied. While initial prejudice was directed against historically stigmatized populations, such as the Maghrebi and especially Moroccan population in the Spanish case, prejudice now encompasses the Muslim population in general, regardless of where the people subject to Islamophobic acts come from. Moreover, one might say that Islamophobia at present is basically addressed to people we have defined as Muslims, independently of whether or not they are, and independently of their own self-description. In the Spanish context we can find an example of this in Sub-Saharan ethnic communities (as in other contexts, the stigmatized ethnic population can be another6)—the Senegalese, for instance. In this case, the ‘host society’ has established no mechanical relationship whereby any ‘Black’ Senegalese identified as Muslim, yet there is a causeeffect reaction whereby most Moroccans or Maghrebis (formerly colonized and not ‘submissive’) are Muslims, even if the ‘departure point’ for both groups is the same (in this case Sunni, etc.)—the same which in the other would apply to Mouride Muslims of the Wolof ethnic group, or those pertaining to the Tijaan (Tijaniyyah) confraternity, etc. This leads to reflection on the processes of identity-building versus the ‘other,’ via which in most cases the

place of origin is not distinguished: one does not know what the invented enemy is, neither culturally nor ethnically, as suspicion is extended to anything that ‘sounds’ Arab, Muslim or ‘Islamic,’ beyond ‘sure’ analyses regarding the construction of otherness. To that end, the ‘only good Muslim,’ one not subject to the prejudices and judgments of the surrounding society, is the one not identified as such or who simply keeps out of the limelight or hides his/her respective identity. However, this is not entirely valid, given that the ‘Muslimness’ label, which identifies and at times categorizes or serves to discredit an individual or community, goes beyond its own bounds, given that it depends on other factors and perhaps the biased view we have of the ‘us’ against the other.

A2 k2 Challenge RacismThe word ‘Islamophobia’ triggers rejection , rather than acceptance, and fails to include other forms of prejudice- over use of the term only weakens the movementAllen 07 (CHRIS ALLEN, a Lecturer in Social Policy. He is based in the Institute of Applied Social Studies, School of Social Policy at the University of Birmingham where he is the Acting Director of Undergraduate Social Policy Programmes and Programme Lead on the Policy, Politics & Economics (PPE) programme)(“ISLAMOPHOBIA AND ITS CONSEQUENCES”, 2007, Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS))//ASMITH

However both the report and its model have failed to stand the test of time and a detailed analysis highlights a number of serious flaws.20 The most obvious disadvantage of the term is that it is understood to be a ‘phobia’. As phobias are irrational, such an accusation makes people defensive and defiant, in turn making reflective dialogue all but impossible. Likewise, Islamophobia as a separate and stand-alone concept implies that prejudice against Muslims is unrelated to other forms of prejudice, for example prejudice based around physical appearance and skin colour; prejudice against immigrants; prejudice against military, religious or economic rivals; and prejudices around class, power and status. The separateness of the concept can also imply that Muslims themselves want to be ‘separate’ or ‘different’ even, thereby failing to recognise or accept the ‘similarities’ and ‘overlaps’ that also exist. Relevant to the contemporary climate in particular is that the continued use or over-use of the term prevents – either inadvertently or deliberately, depending upon the sources in question, legitimate criticisms of Muslims being voiced, let alone attended to. Elsewhere it has been used far too indiscriminately and inappropriately, failing to differentiate between opinions that are antireligion per se from those that are specifically anti-Islam. For example, ‘I am an Islamophobe, yes,’ said Polly Toynbee in the Guardian newspaper, ‘But I am a Christophobe and Judeophobe too’.21 As Halliday has argued, the key phenomenon to be addressed is an anti-Muslim hostility directed at an ethno-religious identity rather than the tenets of a religion.22 In terms of the Runnymede model and Rokeach’s Dogmatism Scale upon which it was based therefore, “the instrument does not measure up to the theory”.23 As regards Islamophobia per se, the same is blatantly true: the instruments we have to define, identify and explain it neither measure up to the theory nor are they entirely bias-free. Despite being able to identify incidents, events and expressions of what we might simplistically suggest as being ‘Islamophobia’, as the EUMC 9/11 report noted, “these were not necessarily in themselves the reason for any attacks…”. Islamophobia seemed to be the “…stimulant” underpinning them.24 Consequently, what was thought to be known about Islamophobia failed to provide any insight or explanation as to why Islamophobic retaliatory acts ensued or why such a phenomenon exists. Consequently, we are trying to locate something that we maybe do not adequately understand, hence Maussen’s comments. Nonetheless, the EUMC’s 9/11 report does offer some respite from this lack of clarity. As it stated: [N]either exhaustive nor conclusive…[it did] clarify some of the common trends and themes that were apparent in the wake of September 11. No single explanation can completely account for the events that followed those in the US, but this does allow an insight into a certain identifiable phenomenon…25 Most important therefore is the report’s categorical and justifiable conclusion that a “certain identifiable phenomenon” was evident.26 In doing so, and in contrast to the Runnymede model, the report differentiated the manifestations – the ‘common trends and themes’ – from what it saw as the phenomenon of Islamophobia itself, neither concluding nor making the assumption that the

manifestations or forms of that ‘certain identifiable phenomenon’ were either that which constituted it or defined it.

A2 Homogenizing Bad The term ‘Islamophobia’ causes homogenization of Islam identity and enforces the concept of the other – prevents successful results Halliday 99 (FRED HALLIDAY is Professor of International Relations at The London School of Economics and Political Science.)(“'Islamophobia' reconsidered”, 1999, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22:5, 892-902, DOI: 10.1080/014198799329305)//ASMITH

Such historicization and disaggregation is relevant to the issue of what to term prejudice against Muslims.6 That there is such a thing as denoted by the term ‘Islamophobia’ is undoubtedly true. Recent examples in the British press are not hard to �nd.7 Elsewhere we can see similar trends: in Denmark the People’s Party has made such hostility central to its programme; 8 in 1998 Hollywood produced an alarmist �lm, The Siege, focusing on Islamic terrorism, in marked contrast, be it said, to its indulgent treatment of Irish republicanism. Nor is this speci �c to the Christian or Jewish world: perhaps the most striking instance of hostility to Muslims today is to be found in India. The BJP ran for re-election in 1997 on three anti-Muslim issues: rebuilding the Temple at Ayodhya, removing separate legal codes for Muslims, and ending the special status of Kashmir. Other BJP policies – renaming Bombay after a Hindu goddess, rewriting history books – follow a similar logic. The positing of a continuous, historic, past of confrontation may not only be historically inaccurate but may ascribe cause to religion, an eternal factor, where other, more contingent and contemporary causes, may be at work. It also misses the point about what it is that is being attacked: ‘Islam’ as a religion was the enemy in the past: in the crusades or the reconquista . It is not the enemy now: Islam is not threatening to win large segments of western European society to its faith, as Communism did, nor is the polemic, in press, media or political statement, against the Islamic faith. There are no books coming out questioning the claims of Muhammad or the Koran. The attack now is against not Islam as a faith but Muslims as a people, the latter grouping together all, especially immigrants, who might be covered by the term. Equally, the ‘Islamophobic’ attack is against states which may be among the most secular in the world, as Saddam Hussein’s is. If we take the study as one of negative stereotyping, of what in German is called the Feindbild, the enemy image, then the enemy is not a faith or a culture, but a people. Hence the more accurate term is not ‘Islamophobia’ but ‘anti-Muslimism’. Use of the term ‘Islamophobia’ may also convey two other, misleading associations. One is that the term reproduces the distortion , already discussed, that there is one Islam : that there is something out there against which the phobia can be directed. This serves not only to obscure diversity, but also to play into the hands of those, within the Muslim communities, who wish to reply to this attack by offering their own selective interpretation of the tradition, be this on women, rights of free speech, the right to renounce religion or anything else. ‘Islamophobia’ indulges conformism and authority within Muslim communities: one cannot avoid the sense, in regard to work such as the Runnymede Report, that the race relations world has yielded, for reasons of political convenienc e, on this term. Use of the term ‘Islamophobia’ also challenges the possibility of dialogue based on universal principles. It suggests, as the Runnymede and Wilton Park reports do, that the solution lies in greater dialogue, bridge building, respect for the other community: but this inevitably runs the risk of denying the right, or possibility, of criticisms of the practices of those with whom one is having the dialogue. Not only those who, on universal human rights grounds, object to elements in Islamic or other traditions and current rhetoric, but also those who challenge conservative readings from within, can more easily be classed as Islamophobes.9 The advocacy of a

dialogue, one that presupposes given, homogeneous , communities places the emphasis on understanding the ‘other’, rather than on engaging with the ways in which communities, national and religious, violate universal rights. The danger in these reports is that they are de.ned, if not monopolized, by representatives of religious bodies, and of community organizations, who apply to them the conventions of inter-faith dialogue: 10 the churches have a role, in educating their own people about the faith, but also about the everyday lives and political grievances, of other faiths, Muslims included. This cannot and should not be at the expense of a critical examination of how these religions treat their members. ‘Islamophobia’ may also have confusing practical results. The grievances voiced by Muslims in any society may relate directly to religious matters: of school curriculum, dress, diet, observance of ceremonial days. But much of what is presented as the Islamic critique of the West has little or nothing to do with religion: it is secular, often nationalist, protest and none the less valid for that. Support for Palestine, denunciations of Western hegemony in the oil market, solidarity with Iraq, opposition to Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, denunciations of cultural imperialism, protests at double standards on human rights – these are all part of the ‘Muslim’ indictment of the West, but are not necessarily religious in content, or speci.c to the Muslim world. The Chinese denunciation of Western human rights interference, on the ground that it violates sovereignty, is the same as the Iranian. It has little to do with belief, and a lot to do with political power in the contemporary world. Similarly, within Western society, issues of immigration, housing, employment, racial prejudice, anti-immigrant violence are not speci.cally religious: the British term ‘Paki’ can, in a racist attack by white youth, as easily denote a Hindu, a Sikh or a Christian from Tamil Nadu as a Muslim. Nor should the international implications of all this be overlooked, not least because they so directly affect the level of dialogue within Western societies: the violation of human rights, in the name of religion or secular power, is found in many Muslim as in non-Muslim societies. The analysis within the West of attitudes to Islam, and of renderings of Islamic tradition, cannot be divorced from what is going on within Muslim societies themselves: here horrendous violations of human rights are being committed, against Muslims, in the name of religion. The fight against fundamentalism is not, as Bobby Sayyid presents it, between the West and the Muslim world, but within the Muslim world itself: the briefest acquaintance with the recent history of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt or Algeria would bear this out. Those who protest the loudest about such violations are inhabitants of these countries, that is to say, Muslims themselves. Their protests are framed in universal terms, and demand a universal response.11 This is as true for political prisoners, trade unionists, journalists, women, as it is for representatives of ethnic groups within Muslim countries who are denied recognition and group rights. There are, as in any discussion of human rights, dif.cult issues here – relating to accuracy of information, approach, impartiality. But to deny their right to make these protests, on the grounds that there can only be one Muslim voice, or that their invocation of universal principles violates tradition, is a paradoxical conclusion for those who begin by protesting at non- Muslim discrimination against Muslims. ‘Islamophobia’, like its predecessor ‘imperialism’, can too easily be used to silence critics of national states and élites.

Terror DA

CT Good—1nc** Religion stokes violent extremism—counterterrorism policies are keyRashi, 14—freelance journalist and writer for the Huffington Post (Tanjil, 3/16/14, "‘The Muslims are Coming!’, by Arun Kundnani", Financial Times, www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/af5ef4c6-aa15-11e3-8bd6-00144feab7de.html)//twemchen

**edited for language

In truth, counterterrorism policies targeting Muslims are a legitimate response to homegrown extremism , from the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby to the 366 (by one count) British citizens waging jihad in Syria. Furthermore, the victims of the 2005

London bombings bear witness to the reality of radicalism bred at home . At best, Kundnani’s argument is compelling in its dissection of governments’ disproportional responses. He estimates the FBI has one counter-terrorism agent per 94 Muslims in the US, which approaches a Stasi-esque ratio of spies to citizens. He shows that authorities keep drawing spurious lists of suspected radicals; one in the UK included almost 300 children under 15. A commonplace at the core of Kundnani’s critique is

that radicalism is mainly the byproduct of western foreign policy. “Religion had nothing to do with this,” according to Kundnani, citing a conspirator in the London bombings. This view is undermined by the existence of two generations of British Muslims predating the war on terro r – men who fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s and in Bosnia in the 1990s. The diminution of religion’s role in stoking radicalism is as inaccurate as UK Labour politicians’ denial that wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan acted even as recruiting sergeants. Kundnani scrutinises responses to terrorism better than outlining its causes. He probes the mutations of liberalism in the face of Islam, resulting in “war on terror liberals” for whom liberalism “became an ideology of total war”, from the UK Labour party’s interventionist foreign policy to Martin Amis’s innumerate paranoia about Muslim birth rates. Liberals hold up the Enlightenment, conservatives “campaign to defend Judeo-Christian identity” – both banners

explicitly excluding Muslims; both groups inclined, Kundnani writes, to see “terrorists motivated by fanaticism inherent to Islam”. History offers correctives to these narratives , demonstrating varieties of Islam being as rooted in rationalism as the Enlightenment; the Enlightenment being as tied to terror as Islam (the word “terrorism” itself was first used during The Terror of the Enlightenment-inspired French revolution). The Muslims are Coming! lacks optimism but there is every reason to be- lieve “Muslim” might one day be suffixed to “Judeo-Christian” when describing the west’s culture and values. Note how one prominent French intellectual writes about Europe’s growing population of a certain religious minority: “All of them are born with raging fanaticism in their hearts.” The author of these unenlightened remarks? Voltaire. His subject? The Jews.

A2 Ks/D—Overview If we win the radicalization thesis is true, i.e. that ISIS really is trying to recruit lone wolf terrorists, it’s proof we need at least some agent infiltrators, material support legislation and community engagement. They eliminate all of those – even if those should be reduced because they’re overused, an inevitability as more suspects are investigated and then disqualified, the plan leaves us dangerously vulnerable to the next Charlie Hebdo or Boston bombing.

This answers most of their Ks and proves we overcome most logical defense. Terrorists wouldn’t need to launch some 9/11 style cross-border attack, they’d just need to flip one impressionable young activist into doing something catastrophic and provide them the basic know-how and resources in constructing WMDs – we’ve done tons of work on the case supporting this

Capability and motivation for attacks exist—European terrorists prove and are on the riseUhlmann, 8—research associate at the Institut für Europäische Politik in Berlin (Milena, Summer 2008, pp. 31-37, "European Converts to Terrorism", The Middle East Quarterly, www.meforum.org/1927/european-converts-to-terrorism)//twemchen

Conversion to Islam among native Europeans is on the rise . Many converts live at peace within their native societies;

some convert only for marriage, and reject neither contemporary culture nor Europe's Judeo-Christian values. A minority, however, embrace s radical interpretations of Islam and can pose a security risk . The involvement of Muslim converts in recent terrorist attacks has raised concern in Europe about these "converts to terrorism." While intelligence agencies and

security services track international communications and guard borders, such homegrown terrorists pose just as potent a threat to the security of Western democracies . European security services and politicians remain unprepared to handle this growing phenomenon. A Growing Problem In Europe, there is very little hard data on conversion to Islam due to the difficulty of gathering proper statistics . Because Muslim communities usually have an informal structure and no

formal clergy, most do not keep records. In France, for instance, state agencies do not record citizens' religious affiliations; to do so, French officials say, would counter France's commitment to secularism. In German registration offices, Muslim residents are included in a pool of "diverse religious affiliations."[1] German converts apparently account for only a small portion—between 12,000 and 100,000—of Germany's total Muslim population of 2.8-3.2 million,[2] which itself comprises less than 4 percent of the total population of Germany. In 2006, the Federal Ministry of the Interior commissioned a study from the Zentralinstitut Islam-Archiv Deutschland (ZIIAD) to determine the number of converts, but amid suspicion over the ZIIAD's methodology, discounted as exaggerated its findings and ended its relationship with the institute.[3] Nevertheless, it appears that both conversions and Islamist outreach to converts is increasing. Thomas Hamza Fischer, founder of the Islamisches Informationszentrum (IIZ) in Ulm, a city in Baden-Württemberg known for its radical Islamist scene, died fighting in Chechnya.[4] The IIZ's journal, Denk mal Islamisch (Think Islamic) is geared to converts, addressing issues such as emotional and personal support. The police, the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (FOC), as well as the Islamisches Informationszentrum's neighbors say that more German converts have visited the center since summer 2007 than they had in seasons past.[5] Apparently anticipating a ban by the Bavarian Ministry of Interior, the IIZ dissolved in October 2007.[6] In recent years, police and intelligence services have become increasingly aware of the threat of homegrown terrorism. In 2003, Judge Jean Louis Bruguière, the former French investigating magistrate in charge of counterterrorism affairs, observed that Al-Qaeda had increased its recruiting efforts in Europe and in particular was on the lookout for women and converts to Islam.[7] In March 2004, the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) released an analysis of jihadi recruits' backgrounds,[8] and the following year, the British Home and Foreign Offices released a similar study.[9] In August 2007, the New York Police Department released a report on radicalization within Western societies, focusing on trends in homegrown terrorism and emphasizing the increasing role of converts in terror plots.[10] Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany's federal minister of the interior, argues that the

prevalence of homegrown jihadis is increasing.[11] Germaine Maurice Lindsay, also known as Abdullah Shaheed Jamal, was one of four terrorists who

detonated bombs on the London Underground and on a bus in central London, July 7, 2005, killing fifty-six (including themselves) and injuring more than 700. Lindsay, who changed his name after his conversion to Islam, was born in Jamaica. The 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the Madrid train bombings the same year, and the following year's attacks on London's Tube and bus system demonstrate that European citizens and residents can conduct horrendous acts against their respective countries. The culmination of this trend will be the planning of and participation in such attacks by European converts to Islam. On September 4, 2007, the German security services arrested three men for plotting car bomb attacks in Germany targeting the U.S. military base at Ramstein and pubs and nightclubs frequented by Americans.[12] Two of the three were German-born converts to Islam.[13] This plot was not the first involving German converts. In 1997, Israeli security services detained Steven Smyrek at Ben Gurion International Airport as he tried to enter Israel to survey possible Hezbollah terror targets.[14] Christian Ganczarski, a Polish immigrant of German descent who had converted to Islam in 1986, played a major role as the intermediary between Al-Qaeda's leadership and the suicide bomber who carried out the 2002 bombing of a Tunisian synagogue in Djerba, which killed twenty-one people.[15] In 2006, the German police arrested Sonja B., a 40-year-old German convert who sought to travel to Iraq with her 1-year-old son and to carry out a

suicide attack.[16] For Islamist terrorists, the European convert is a prized recruit, at ease in society, cognizant of informal rules and opportunities, and able to move freely without arousing suspicion. Their citizenship enables them to travel freely under the terms of the European Schengen agreement and, in many cases, the U.S. visa waiver program.[17] Richard Reid, a British convert to Islam who attempted to blow up an airliner with explosives hidden in his shoes and boarded a flight to the United States under the visa waiver program, highlighted the threat of European converts to terrorism to both their own homelands and U.S. security . Short of requiring visas for British, French, and German passport holders, U.S. authorities have requested that airlines provide detailed passenger rosters for incoming flights to the United States.

European carriers have followed suit. Identifying Terrorist Converts European security services are unsure of how to address the problem of radicalized converts largely due to their uncertainty about how to integrate competing security and civil liberties interests. On one hand, the abandonment of passport control posts along internal European borders—the heart of the European integration process—needs to be addressed; EU states must adjust to the fact that criminal enterprises span borders. On the other hand, the European public distrusts any measure that might lead European institutions, let alone a European intelligence service, to increase surveillance, especially given the

opacity of EU decision-making. At the national level, however, there is perhaps a greater sense of urgency in monitoring converts to terrorism. In September 2007, Günther Beckstein, the Bavarian minister of the interior, proposed registering and observing every convert to Islam in Germany in order to determine whether the future Muslim would pursue a liberal or an Islamist orientation.[18] This suggestion provoked an uproar. Critics said it put converts under general suspicion, undercut religious dialogue, and contradicted the principle of religious freedom. Such populist tactics, though, are likely to be counterproductive. Nothing is gained by placing converts under surveillance simply because they married a Muslim or found religious satisfaction through Islamic theology. Such tactics might backfire if they alienate the convert, and they would require a massive investment in intelligence gathering for a questionable return. They would also be domestically unpopular: Europeans would certainly argue that turning all converts to Islam into terrorism suspects runs counter to the ideals of European liberalism. Profiling potential terrorists, however, should not be taboo. Doing so requires an understanding of the mentality of both the individual convert and of the group into which the individual converts. Many converts embrace their new faith with zeal, and Islamist groups can channel this fervor into a process of quick radicalization.[19] New converts are often less proficient in religious matters than religious leaders but are eager to fill in the gaps, making them susceptible to indoctrination by organizations like the Islamisches Informationszentrum. In larger cities such as Berlin, advocates of various Islamic trends often recruit new converts. Among the most aggressive are the Salafists.[20] Converts wanting to explore and learn more about their new religion are often attracted to fundamentalist interpretations as they seek "pure" and "true" Islam. Jihadi websites reinforce this search—indeed, this was how Sonja B., the would-be Iraq suicide bomber, discovered militant Islam.[21] Foreign scholarships also provide a means of recruitment. After his conversion but prior to becoming involved in terrorism, Ganczarski, the German Al-Qaeda intermediary, studied Islam on a scholarship at the University of Medina, described by the Deutsches Orient-Institut as a "recruiting pool" for Islamists.[22] After his arrest, Ganczarski said there had been a recruitment wave for such scholarships in Germany in the mid-1990s, focusing on young converts. After he returned from Saudi Arabia where he probably became radicalized, he went on to Chechnya and Pakistan as well as Afghanistan[23] where he met Osama bin Laden.[24] Apparently, Saudi Arabia provided thousands of such scholarships.[25] The background of the convert is as important as the nature of the absorbing group. Those who convert to Islam for practical purposes, for example, to marry a Muslim woman, seldom become extremists. Others are predisposed to radicalism. Smyrek is an extreme example: He was always a radical and actively sought out Islamist terror groups in order to become a suicide bomber. The convert's socioeconomic background is another vital factor. Conversion is, in part, a migration from one worldview to another,[26] described by sociologist Thomas Luckmann as a decision to go shopping in a supermarket of religious goods.[27] As the individual tries to reconcile his old and new belief systems, he selects explanations that best meet his needs. Sometimes, this involves the endorsement of terrorism as a means of righting perceived wrongs. Motives to Convert Because Islam often has a negative reputation in Europe, conversion to Islam enables the convert to project sentiments of rebellion. Indeed, Olivier Roy from the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique has suggested that radical Islam is tantamount to a protest identity.[33] Some converts emphatically champion Islam as the best alternative to post-industrial Western society. Such is the rationale for Murad Wilfried Hofmann,[34] a former German diplomat who converted to Islam in 1980 and has since acted as an intellectual leader for German converts. Ayyub Axel Köhler, the current chairman of the Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland, who converted to Islam in 1963, has remarked that Islam is a way of life and thus offers its adherents the chance to avoid the alienation of life in Western societies.[35] If the numbers of conversions to Islam in the West are on the rise, the cultural criticism underlying such conversions becomes especially relevant. Identity issues play an important role, as does globalization and modern communications, which have allowed the exploration of new identities. When societies lose their coherence, threats increase from within.[36]

Anti-Blackness

Link—Junior PartnersAppeals to solve oppression of society’s junior partners is always underwritten by a supplemental anti-blackness which masks the prison-slave and the prison-slave-in-waitingWilderson, 7

(Frank B. Wilderson III 2007. Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy. Duke University Press. pg 23 –kpcb)There is something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of "absolute dereliction" (Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot become one of civil society's many junior partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons. In light of this, coalitions and social movements, even radical social movements like the Prison Abolition Movement, bound up in the solicitation of hegemony, so as to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of civil society, ultimately accommodate only the satiable demands and finite antagonisms of civil society's junior partners (i.e., immigrants, white women, and the working class), but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and endless antagonisms of the prison slave and the prison-slave-in-waiting. In short, whereas such coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright handmaidens of white supremacy, their rhetorical structures and political desire are underwritten by a supplemental anti-Blackness.

Link—Law The aff’s call for legal relief is the perfection of slavery Farley 5 [Boston College (Anthony, “Perfecting Slavery”, http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=lsfp)]

Slavery is with us still . We are haunted by slavery. We are animated by slavery. White-over-black is slavery and segregation and neosegregation and every situation in which the distribution of material or spiritual goods follows the colorline. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation to whatever form of white-over-black

it is that may come with post-modernity or after is not toward freedom. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation is the movement of slavery perfecting itself . White-over-black is neosegregation. White-over-black is segregation. White-over-black is slavery. All of it is white-over-black , only white- over-black, and that continually . The story of progress up from slavery is a lie, the longest lie. The story of progress up from slavery is told juridically in the form of the rule of law. Slavery is the rule of law . And slavery is death. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it bows down before its master of its own free will . That is the moment in which the slave accomplishes the impossible reconciliation of its freedom with its unfreedom by willing itself unfree.3 When exactly does this perfection of slavery take place? The slave bows down before its master when it prays for legal relief, when it prays for equal rights, and while it cultivates the field of law hoping for an answer . The slave’s free choice , the slave’s leap of faith, can only be taken under conditions of legal equality. Only after emancipation and legal equality, only after rights, can the slave perfect itself as a slave . Bourgeois legality is the condition wherein equals are said to enter the commons of reason4 or the kingdom of ends5 or the New England town meeting of the soul to discuss universalizable principles, to discuss equality and freedom. Much is made of these meetings, these struggles for law,

these festivals of the universal. Commons, kingdom, town meeting, there are many mansions in the house of law, but the law does not forget its father, as Maria Grahn-Farley observes: The law of slavery has not been forgotten by the law of segregation; the law of segregation has not been forgotten by the law of neosegregation. The law guarding the gates of slavery, segregation, and neosegregation has not forgotten its origin ; it remembers

its father and its grandfather before that. It knows what master it serves; it knows what color to count.6 To wake from slavery is to see that everything must go, every law room,7 every great house, every plantation, all of it, everything . Requests for equality and freedom will always fail. Why? Because the fact of need itself means that the request will fail . The request for equality and freedom , for rights, will fail whether the request is granted or denied. The request is produced through an injury .8 The initial injury is the marking of bodies for less—less respect, less land, less freedom, less education, less . The mark must be made on the flesh because that is where we start from. Childhood is where we begin and, under conditions of hierarchy, that childhood is already marked. The mark organizes, orients, and differentiates our otherwise common flesh. The mark is race, the mark is gender, the mark is class, the mark is. The mark is all there is to the reality of those essences—race, gender, class, and so on—that are said to precede existence. The mark is a system.9 Property and law follow the mark. And so it goes. There is a pleasure in hierarchy. We begin with an education in our hierarchies. We begin with childhood and childhood begins with education. To be exact, education begins our

childhood. We are called by race, by gender, by class, and so on. Our education cultivates our desire in the direction of our hierarchies. If we are successful, we acquire an orientation that enables us to locate ourselves and our bodies vis-à-vis all the other bodies that inhabit our institutional spaces. We follow the call and move in the

generally expected way. White-overblack is an orientation, a pleasure, a desire that enables us to find our place, and therefore our way, in our institutional spaces. This is why no one ever need ask for equality and freedom. This is why the fact of need means that the request will fail. The request for rights—for equality—will always fail because there are always ambiguities. To be marked for less, to be marked as less han zero, to be marked as a negative attractor, is to be in the situation of the slave. The slave is not called. The slave is not free. The slave is called to follow the calling that is not a calling. The slave is trained to be an object; the slave is trained, in other words, to not be. The slave is death. Death is the end of ambiguity. To be in the situation of the slave is to have

all the ambiguities organized against you. But there are always ambiguities, one is always free. How, then, are the ambiguities organized?

How is freedom ended? The slave must choose the end of ambiguity, the end of freedom, objecthood . The

slave must freely choose death. This the slave can only do under conditions of freedom that present it with a choice. The perfect slave gives up the ghost and commends its everlasting spirit to its master. The slave’s final and perfect prayer is a legal prayer for equal rights. The texts of law, like the manifest content of a dream, perhaps of wolves, may tell a certain story or an uncertain story. The certainty or uncertainty of the story is of absolutely no consequence. The story, the law, the wolves’ table manners, do not matter. The story, the law, the story of law, the dream of wolves,10 however, represents a disguised or latent wish

that does matter. The wish is a matter of life or death. We are strangers to ourselves. The dream of equality, of rights, is the disguised wish for hierarchy . The prayer for equal rights is the disguised desire for slavery. Slavery is death. The prayer for equal rights, then, is the disguise of the deathwish. The prayer for equal rights is the slave’s perfect moment . The slave’s perfect prayer, the prayer of the perfect slave, is

always answered. The slave, however, knows not what it does when it prays for rights, for the slave is estranged from itself. Of its own inner strivings it knows not. The slave strives to be property, but since property cannot own property the slave cannot own its inner strivings. The slave strives to produce the final commodity— law. In other words, the slave

produces itself as a slave through law. The slave produces itself as a slave (as a commodity) through its own prayer for equal rights. And that prayer is all there is to law. The slave bows down before the law and prays for equal rights. The slave bows down before the law and then there is law. There is no law before the slave bows down. The slave’s fidelity becomes the law, and the law is perfected through the slave’s struggle for the universal, through the slave’s struggle for equality of right. The slave prays for equality of

right. Rights cannot be equal. Its perfect prayer is answered; the law’s ambiguities open, like the gates of heaven, just above its head. And all of the white-over-black accumulated within the endless ambiguities of law rains down. White over-black is slavery and slavery is death. Death is the end of forever. The end of forever is perfection and perfection, for us, seems divine, beyond the veil, beyond death; hence, the end of forever.

Link—State We cannot resolve anti-blackness through the state because of the institutions ethics and acting through the state makes anti-blackness worse because it erases the existence of the black body – the state forecloses the possibility of humanity for those in the non-human positionalityWilderson, 10

(Award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2010 (Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 15-16)

Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims successfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why

should we think of today’s Blacks in the US as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer

these questions by demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the State has come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black President aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of HIV infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still constitute the lived experience of Black life . But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on “solid” ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to “facts,” the “historical record,” and empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political science, history, and/or public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it . The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and

why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the “solid” plank of “work” is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of “claims against the state”—the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates into thin air . The imaginary of the state and civil society is

parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way: no slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a positionality against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews it coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy, but on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.

Root Cause** Islamophobia is instrumentalized across cultures and societies by association with blackness—even if Islamophobia is a branch of the tree, anti-black racism is the root Love 09 (Erik Love, an ISPU Fellow and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, received his MA and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Santa Barbara.) (Confronting Islamophobia in the United States: framing civil rights activism among Middle Eastern Americans, 23 Sep 2009. Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 43, Nos 3--4, 401-425, DOI: 10.1080/00313220903109367)//ASMITH

Before examining details of Islamophobic discourse in the United States, a sketch of current Middle Eastern American demographics will be useful. However, even without taking into consideration important issues of gender, sexuality and hybrid identities, there is great diversity across Middle Eastern American communities, and space constraints do not permit a full discussion of the contemporary demographics of these groups. Groups in the United States who trace their heritage to southern Asia*/a region usually defined to include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka*/are quite diverse and difficult to describe in general terms. Aside from the many national-origin groups elided under the pan-ethnic label ‘South Asian’, there are several ethnic groups fromthis region that are well represented in the United States, including Bengali, Pashtun and Punjabi Americans. In terms of religion, immigrants from this region belong to many denominations of Islam and Christianity, and there are Sikh, Hindu, Parsi and other religious identifications as well.19 Socio-economically, South Asian Americans have one of the highest levels of education and income of any demographic group, but the most recent (since 1990) immigrants fromthis region are more often working-class and relatively less well off financially.20 The category ‘Arab’ similarly defies easy definition. There is considerable disagreement among people who trace their heritage to the Arab world about whether everyone from an Arab country should identify as Arab, or whether Arab ethnicity is purely voluntary. In terms of demographics, Arab Americans today include families who moved to the United States as many as five or six generations ago, and there are also a significant number of recent (post-1970) immigrants from the more than twenty nations in the Arab world.21 In terms of religion, Arab Americans belong to many different religious communities, including several denominations of Christianity and Islam, along with Judaism and other faiths. The largest nationality groups among Arab Americans include Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Egyptians, Iraqis and people from Gulf states like Yemen and the United Arab Emirates. Socio-economically, Arab Americans have similar characteristics to South Asian Americans. Arab Americans who immigrated earlier in the twentieth century tend to have higher educational attainment and income levels than the average American family, while the most recent immigrants tend to have a range of socio-economic class backgrounds.22 Further complicating the demographic picture are the many Americans who trace their heritage to parts of the Middle East (including parts of the Arab world) and do not identify as Arab American. These include Iranians, Turks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Druze, Kurds, Copts and people who identify with many other ethnicities, religions and nationalities. The demographics of these communities in the United States are often the inverse of that found in their nations of origin, as minority populations in the Middle East, particularly in terms of religious identification, tend to emigrate in higher numbers.23 Detailed demographic information on these communities is particularly difficult to find, since most surveys overlook them or simply count them as ‘Arabs’.24 In terms of religion, these Middle Easterners belong to several denominations of Islam as well

as Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and other religions as well. Neither can Muslim Americans be easily categorized: there are Muslim Americans in every demographic group, and they follow several different Islamic traditions (or denominations) while holding a wide range of personal religious beliefs within those traditions. Rendering a coherent description of Muslim American communities is particularly difficult because surveys about religious identity are notoriously inaccurate and contradictory. Still, there is considerable recent literature describing Muslim American demography in terms of ethnicity and nationality, socio-economic class, geographic concentration and political tendencies.25 There have been substantial changes in Muslim American demographics in a short period of time. One widely cited recent survey from the Pew Research Center reports that some two-thirds of immigrant Muslim Americans are first-generation immigrants, with more than a third of those arriving after 1990. In terms of numbers, the survey reports that the largest ethnic group of Muslim Americans are from South Asia and Iran, followed by families from the Arab world. The survey also reports that many Muslims migrated from Europe, and there are also many Muslim converts representing all heritages and backgrounds.26 Prior to the most recent migration of Muslims to the United States after 1990, the largest subgroup under the Muslim American umbrella were those Muslims who also identified as African Americans, a group sometimes referred to as ‘indigenous Muslims ’ .27 There are significant differences between immigrant and indigenous Muslim Americans, in terms of theology, socio-economic status and political involvement. In short, there is vast diversity among Middle Eastern Americans. But in spite of the diversity across all these groups, the ideology of race means that any of these groups is a potential target of American Islamophobia.

A2 CoalitionsIslamophobia is only a manifestation of racialization—the fact that Middle Easterners are deemed white by law means they could never include other minorities in their struggle against lawLove 09 (Erik Love, an ISPU Fellow and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, received his MA and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Santa Barbara.) (Confronting Islamophobia in the United States: framing civil rights activism among Middle Eastern Americans, 23 Sep 2009. Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 43, Nos 3--4, 401-425, DOI: 10.1080/00313220903109367)//ASMITH

Approaching Islamophobia as a product of racial dynamics in the United States brings certain analytical advantages. First, this approach draws on a wealth of knowledge about race and ethnicity to explain how Islamophobia does not always target Islam and Muslims per se, but instead takes on the familiar pattern of racial scapegoating: fear and hatred, prejudice and discrimination directed towards groups crudely demarcated primarily by physical appearance.5 Race clearly plays a role when Sikh American and African American Muslim children are harassed in similar ways in classrooms, when Syrian Americans along with Pakistani Americans have to present themselves to immigration authorities for ‘special registration’, when Lebanese American and Iranian American workers lose their jobs for the same discriminatory reasons, and when Chaldean churches and Sunni mosques alike are vandalized and receive the same kinds of hate mail. These kinds of incidents, which impact on a large range of communities in spite of their diversity, occur primarily as a result of the racial lens through which Americans understand the world. The ideology of race is understood as a flexible social construct, subject to modification through the work of actors who target the state as they seek recognition and redress.6 The process of racialization profoundly affects all individuals in the United States, because each person is perceived to belong to socially constructed racial categories. The categories themselves change over time, as do the criteria for membership in any particular category; people recognized as belonging to the Irish race, for example, later became ‘white’ due to changes in the predominant racial ideology. These identity categories take on meaning and have material consequences via state policy and resource provision, through representations in cultural space and through the organization of institutions in civil society. The prevailing ‘racial order’ at any point in history indicates the schema or hierarchy of recognized racial identity categories, created through a ‘compromise between racial movements and the state’.7 From the latter part of the twentieth century to the present day (the so-called ‘post-civil rights era’), the ‘racial pentagon’ of black, white, Latino, Asian and Native American has been described as the prevailing list of recognized racial identity categories in the United States.8 Where do individuals and groups affected by racialized Islamophobia ‘fit’? According to the United States Census, people from the broadly defined Middle Eastern region legally count as racially white. This creates a paradox, as described by John Tehranian: On one hand, [Middle Eastern Americans] suffer from the types of discrimination that face minority groups. On the other hand, formally speaking, Middle Easterners are deemed white by law. This dualistic and contested ontology of the Middle Eastern racial condition creates an unusual paradox. Reified as the other, Americans of Middle Eastern descent do not enjoy the benefits of white privilege. Yet, as white under the law, they are denied the fruits of remedial action.9 The unclear position caused by this racial paradox*/in terms of citizenship, rights and identity*/of migrants and their descendants who came to the United States from North Africa and

western and southern Asia, a large region now vaguely defined as the Middle East, dates back to the eighteenth century if not earlier. The groups under the Middle Eastern racial umbrella often have little in common with one another except that, in the United States, Islamophobia lumps them together and makes them targets of discrimination and racism. In other words, ‘Islamophobia’ is the latest term for a centuries-long history of American state policy, cultural discourses and discriminatory practices that enforce racial boundaries around Middle Easterners in America.

Foucault

1nc—Foucault LinkThe aff’s invocation of state reform perpetuates the same governmentality that drove the ethnicization, racialization and culturalization of Islamophobia in the first place – we don’t need to win an alt if we win we turn the case Kaya 11 (Ayhan Kaya, Willy Brandt Professor at Malmö University, and Professor of Politics at Istanbul Bilgi University)(“Islamophobia as a form of Governmentality: Unbearable Weightiness of the Politics of Fear”, Willy Brandt Series of Working Papers in International Migration and Ethnic Relations 1/11, 2011, Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM))//ASMITH

As a discourse that travels between state, civil society, and citizens, that produces and organizes subjects, and that is used by subjects to govern themselves, islamophobia could also be seen to embody what Foucault formulated as a distinctive feature of modern governmentality. An analysis of modern ‘government’ needs to pay particular attention to the role accorded to ‘indirect’ mechanisms for aligning economic, social and personal conduct with socio-political objectives. Today, political power is exercised through a set of multiple agencies and techniques, some of which are only loosely associated with the executives and bureaucracies of the formal organs of state (Miller and Rose, 2011: 26). The state is not the source or agent of all governing power, nor does it monopolize political power; rather, the powers and rationalities governing individual subjects and the population as a whole operate through a range of formally nonpolitical knowledges and institutions. The ensemble of legal and nonlegal, pedagogical, cultural, religious, nationalist, and social discourses of Islamophobia together produce what Foucault understands as the signature of modern governmentality. According to Foucault, modern governmental rationality is simultaneously about individualizing and totalizing: that is, about finding answers to the question of what it is for an individual, and for a society or population of individuals, to be governed or governable (Gordon, 1991: 36). Simultaneously totalizing and individualizing, gathering and distinguishing, and achieving each effect through its seeming opposite, Islamophobia emerges as one technique in an arsenal for organizing and managing large and potentially disruptive populations. As such, it is a strand of biopower, that modality of power so named by Foucault because it operates through the orchestration and regulation of life rather than the threat of death (Brockling et al., 2011; Miller and Rose, 2008; Brown, 2006). The orchaestration and regulation of life in modern societies is operationalized by the states through multiple forms of governmentality ranging from nationalism to Islamophobia, or from racism to multiculturalism. Michel Foucault defines governmentality as the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security. In other words, governmentality refers to the practices which characterise the form of supervision a state exercises over its subjects, their wealth, misfortunes, customs, bodies, souls and habits (Foucault, 1979). It is the conduct of conduct, that is to say a form of activity aiming to shape, guide or affect the conduct of individuals or groups. The semantic linking of governing (gouverner) and modes of thought (mentalité) indicates that it is not possible to study the technologies of power without an analysis of the political rationality underpinning them. In this sense, according to Michel Foucault, modern societies can be understood only by reconstructing certain techniques of power, designed to observe, monitor, shape, discipline, or control the behaviour of individuals situated within a range of social and economic institutions such as the school, the factory, the prison, the media, and the church.

Foucault (2007) discerned three inter-related meanings of security: 1) sovereignty confirmed through the enactment of law on the population within a territory; 2) discipline consisting of techniques of individualization directed at making individual subjects docile, conformists and governable; 3) security as an abstraction of the diversity within a population that can be statistically conceived and managed through the guidance of the human sciences such as demographics, economics, and administrative sciences. The key issue here is not the increasing control of the state over its population, but the shifting emphasis in the ‘ethos’ and ‘art’ of governing. For example, following the Foucaultian perspective, one could trace the shift from the administrative state of the past shaped by the police and discipline, to one in which governmental power is dispersed through society by way of professional power at different sites such as education, health, correction systems, media, and fear (Truong and Gasper, 2011). Contemporary states are more inclined to use multiple governmentalities to control and rule the masses. These multiple governmentalities could range from the processes of securitization of migration (Doty, 2000; Huysmans, 2006; Walters, 2006; Kaya, 2009) to the growing political discourse of tolerance (Brown, 2006), or from multiculturalism (Povinelli, 2002) to Islamophobia. As Miller and Rose (2011: 17) put it very well, governmentalities change by entering into periods of criticism and crisis, where multiple perceptions of failure come together, and where alternatives are proposed – for the failures of one mode of governing are opportunities for the formulation of another. The ways in which multiple forms of governmentality are being performed by the states demonstrate to us that there are two sides to governmentality. Firstly, the term refers to a specific form of representation; government defines a discursive field such as prevention of migration or “combating Islamic terrorism” in which exercising power is rationalized. This occurs by the description of concepts, the specification of objects and borders, the provision of fears, arguments and justifications. In this manner, government defines a problem to be addressed and offers certain strategies for handling the problem. And secondly, Foucault uses the term government in a more general context in the ways in which it was used until the 18th century. Government was a term discussed not only in political tracts, but also in philosophical, religious, medical and pedagogic texts. This is why, Foucault defines government as conduct, or, more precisely, as “the conduct of conduct” and thus as a term which ranges from “governing the self” to “governing others”. In other words, in his history of governmentality Foucault endeavours to show how the modern sovereign state and the modern autonomous individual codetermine each other’s emergence (Foucault, 1979). Islamophobia as a form of governmentality is being manufactured in parallel with the growing stream of ethnicization, racialization and culturalization of what is social and political in the west since the early 1990s (Brown, 2006). This stream is advocated by several politicians, public servants, bureaucracy, judiciary, police and the media in order to hold socio-economically and politically deprived migrants and their descendants responsible from their isolation, exclusion, poverty, unemployment, unschooling and any kind of failure in everyday life (Balibar, 2004: 37-38). The process of ethnicizing, racializing and culturalizing what is social and political is not only shaped by dominant political discourses with a great conservative tone, but also by the enormous demographic changes, led by the dissolution of the Eastern Block in late 1980s and early 1990s (Brubaker, 1991; and Kaya, 2009). The year 1989 signalled the very beginning of a new epoch that resulted in massive migration flows of ethnic Germans, ethnic Hungarians, ethnic Russians and Russian Jews from one place to another.24 The post- Communist era has also brought about a process of re-homogenization in western nation-states like Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands. Political instability and ethnic conflicts in the former Eastern Bloc (USSR and former Yugoslavia) on the other hand pushed some ethnic groups to immigrate to Western European countries in which they could find ethnic affinities. The mobility of

millions of people has stimulated nation-states to ethnicise their migration policies in a way that approved the arrival of co-ethnic immigrants, but disapproved the status of existing immigrants with different ethno-cultural and religious background from that of majority society. Nation-states were not suitably equipped in the 1990s to absorb the spontaneous arrival of so many immigrants. This period of demographic change in Western Europe occurred in parallel with the rise of heterophobic discourses such as the ‘clash of civilisations’, ‘culture wars’, ‘religious wars’ and ‘Islamophobia’, as well as with the reinforcement of restrictive migration policies and territorial border security vis-à-vis the nationals of countries outside the European space.