Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire Paperback – August 7, 2012

Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire is a must read if you are at all concerned with American domestic and foreign policies. Dr. Kumar eloquently cuts through the façade of American benevolence, interventionism, and exceptionalism to offer a raw and uncut account of what drives American policy. Rather than caving in to mainstream polemics about left right, east west dichotomies or a-historical phenomena, this powerful and succinct thesis situates today's Islamophobia -across all parties- within an economic, legal, social, and political environment that institutionalizes further the dehumanization of Muslims, Arabs, and other people of color for political ends. Weaving geopolitical transformations over a broad swathe of time and space with critical insights into the past, as well as a keen eye to current similarities, differences, and the ways in which colonial traditions are being marshaled instead of trashed, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire offers a coherent and desperately needed analysis to understand where we are today and how we got here. While powerful elites continue to capitalize on the plunder of "Others," both locally and abroad, obfuscating complex and interrelated realities, Dr. Kumar clearly, accurately, and sensitively exposes the erasure, racism, sexism, class war, and prevailing ideologies and logic that inform so-called 'common sense' national and civilizational myths undergirding an insatiable empire.She is spot by re-orienting the discussion about prejudice, perceptions, culture, and epistemology to one that must be grounded in history, politics, and choices. As a result, those who profit from oil deals and resource extraction, swindling, the manufacturing of war -and the many various and seemingly contradictory beneficiaries of American monetary and military aid and calculated support- need to be called out by name, contextualized, and challenged. Too few scholars are willing to address the glaring and self-destructive elephants in the room of American politics and society, let alone have the courage to situate the United States and empire in the same sentence. But any politics that prioritizes narrow self-interest over the rights of others, or rationalizes by inferences, false premises, and deranged presuppositions in order to crush "Other's" sovereignty and self-determination must be creatively and fervently defied and opposed. No matter who they are, where they are from, or how they have influence, an oppressor is an oppressor and should be labeled as such, and at no other time is the necessary and corresponding research and scholarship needed more then today. Similarly, those at the tip of Empire's sword and media war must be front and center of a just and revolutionary politics, not at the periphery of the discussion, where their animating resistance is given the narrative and emphatic power it deserves.Dr. Kumar's boldness, depth, and clarity is refreshing. No concerned individual, let alone serious scholar, can afford to miss this text.

This book is a must read. Kumar's solid research brings to light a truly different view of Islam, Muslims, and terrorism. She picks apart a host of myths and misunderstandings that we Westerners have of the Middle East and its peoples, gives numerous examples how irrational fear has led to aggregious civil rights violations at home and costly errors in foreign policy. These things do not accidently happen. There are many people, politicians, intellectuals, and well-meaning citizens who perpetuate and exacerbate what may be the worst misunderstanding of human history.Unfortunately, Kumar seems to conflate British and French colonization in the 18th and 19th Centuries with the United States pursuing its interests by supporting its allies in the 21st Century. She barely hides her disdain of the nation of Israel and she seems to think the Israelis should just abandon their lands to the Palentinians. Please, lady. Before the Israelis came, Palestine was a wasteland. Now it's a flourishing nation that is decades ahead of its neighbors. But that is another story.Kumar portrays the fear and distrust of Muslims as racism. Of course, Islam is a religion, practiced by people of all races. We have plenty of racial problems in th US, and they are not limited to Arabic people.Kumar lambastes the viewpoints of other academics and intellectuals, while often displaying her own naivete of national and international politics. She apparently assumed that President Obama, perhaps because he is Black or because his father was a Muslim, should have eliminated all suspicion and mistreatment of American Muslims, immediately halted the Iraq and Afgan wars, and closed Guantanamo upon being sworn into office. The fact that Obama has made substantial progress in the face of withering political opposition seems not the least bit significant.The author's in-your-face attitude works against the intent of her book. She comes across as a foreign-born intellectual, who now enjoys a career as a professor in a state university (Rutgers, in New Jersey) with all the benefits of living in the US, yet who blames America for everything that goes wrong at home and abroad.There is no question that the US has made many serious errors in its foreign policy, often out of pure ignorance and hubris. But that does not reach back into history and change the events of September 11, 2001. Like it or not, those brilliantly sinister hijackings and attacks on America were executed by hateful, angry, violent Muslims, who misunderstand us as badly as we misunderstand them.

This book does a great job of exposing the history of false stereotypes against Muslims and how these ideas are used in the present day for highly political and imperialistic purposes. Some of the accounts that the author mentions are very disheartening to hear about and just prove that hate and fear are tools that will always be used by politicians, the media, and organizations with agendas in order to meet their goals. The author interestingly mentions that significantly more Americans die each year from dog bites, lightning strikes, and even the fact that they lack health insurance than from casualties via terrorist activity around the world (which is very low), yet American dollars are being spent to wage a "War on Terror" instead of alleviating these more fatal problems. The reviewers who rate this book poorly or any other book on the topic are most likely people who believe the "Fox News narrative" and other bogus sources of "news" and would never be open minded to hearing the truth for a change. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic.

I read this as an introduction to Islamophobia issue and I was not disappointed! Kumar goes into heavy detail about the origins of Islamophobia and its role in the past and present. She focuses primarily on the European influence when speaking of the history of Islamophobia and focuses primarily on the U.S. in the modern day standpoint. She is well-sourced and one can easily find where her information was/is found. She also addresses both 'conservative' and 'liberal' versions of Islamophobia. While Kumar doesn't have any detailed ways for the ordinary person to fight Islamophobia, she provides a detailed explanation of how it came to be and why it still persists in American society.

A must read to see beyond smoke screen created by main stream media and their pseudo experts.

Excellent history and analysis of the creation of the racist mindset - and how Orientalism blinds us all.

Deepa Kumar is vividly aware of the impact of Islamophobia on Muslims within the United Sates. She traces the recent growth of anti-Muslim feeling in America, however, to the history of American and European imperialism over many centuries, and to the desire by the Bush administration to justify the revengeful attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, and to justify American support for the state of Israel, particularly the Likud leadership, against Palestinians. She notes, correctly and importantly, that it is frequently the case in human affairs that `an external enemy is ... paired with an internal one against whom palpable fear and hatred are generated. It follows that Islamophobia is about politics and not religion; it is therefore in the realm of politics that Islamophobia must be fought.' She notes too the existence of what she calls `liberal Islamophobia' and in this connection laments that the Democratic Party in the US, as also the political left more generally in western countries, has not yet adequately understood that Islamophobia is a political metter, not a religious one.Kumar writes well and clearly, and with a wealth of references and anecdotes, some of them personal. Her arguments would have been more cogent, or even more cogent, if she had included much more consideration of Islamophobia in contemporary Europe, where those on the receiving end are economically more disadvantaged and oppressed than Muslims in America, and if the insights and concerns of Muslim scholars and commentators, both in Europe and America, had been given a fuller hearing. It would also have been relevant to examine the role of the media, and in this regard the concept of moral panic, and to give more attention to the anxieties about personal and national identity which arise from globalisation.But all in all, this is a useful addition to the growing literature on the nature, causes and consequences of Islamophobia in western countries.