State of dystopia

The Muslim ban did not happen in one day - and it means more than one thing.

The Muslim ban did not happen last January or later in March.    It happened a long time ago - day after day, piece after piece, one slander after another, systematically, consistently, with liberal laughter and conservative malice alike.

The Muslim ban was Trump’s triumphant finale of a chorus long echoed in the sinuous xenophobic labyrinth of a nation always in denial of its own foreign origin, too eager to imagine and identify itself as “white” to demonise and expel from the shadow of its own fears all its colourful differences.

Trump is no aberration.       Trump is a culmination.       He is a salesman. He knows what sells in the United States, and he sells the cultivated hatred of Muslims because he knows he has customers.

From Michele Bachmann and Pamela Geller, to Bill Maher and Sam Harris, from Bernard Lewis to Daniel Pipes, all have been drumming up customers for Trump’s fearmongering against Muslims for a very long time.

The Muslim ban is not merely against those unknown numbers who can no longer come to the United States.          The Muslim ban is far more a condemnation of those known Muslims who are already here - immigrant, naturalised, or US-born. It is to suspend their constitutional protections and Bill of Rights, turn them into strangers in their own land if they are naturalised or US born.   

The Muslim ban is here to intimidate, frighten, and silence them into obedience, leading to the eradication of any trace of their character and culture.    They will not be allowed to add their sign and signature to what it means to be “American”.     As a noun, “American” is and it is to remain white.

The Muslim ban is to silence American Muslims into accepting the final theft of Palestine.       There is a link between the Muslim ban and the appointment of a zealot settler colonialist       as the next US ambassador to Israel. There is a link between the Muslim ban and the presence of another committed settler colonialist in the Oval Office as Trump’s        son-in-law      and a key adviser.

The Muslim ban is here to make an example of them for any other non-white, non-Christian immigrant, never to dare to stand up and claim a pride of place.

Every man, woman and child must look like Trump and his family - speak as they do, think as they do, dye their hair blonde if they have to, starch their skin white, wear colourful contact lenses if they must and preferably sport Ivanka Trump’s merchandise to prove their patriotism. The Muslim ban is the first strike towards the militant whitening of America.

Calling Trump’s immigration policies “ethnic cleansing” has been in the air soon after his election and even before he assumed office and began implementing his vociferous campaign promises.

We Muslims now - as have Native Americans of this land for ever, then blacks, followed by Latinos and Asians - pollute Bannon’s puritanical white supremacy conception of “his nation”. For him we have become the pariah, the untouchables, the Dalits, outside the fourfold of humanity.   The Muslim ban declares Muslims as Muslims as “bare life”, as Italian critical thinker Giorgio Agamben calls it, we have become “homo sacer”.

The Muslim ban is therefore immediately related to the proposed building of a wall along the US southern border specifically designed on the Israeli apartheid wall keeping Palestinians outside their own homeland.

Trump’s remarks against Mexicans being criminals and rapists just because they are Mexicans echoes similar remarks against Muslim being “terrorist” just for being Muslims. Muslims and Mexicans are now the two bookends of the Trumpian dystopia.          But there are many other layers in between.

 

This piece has been excerpted from: ‘The Muslim Ban and the ethnic cleansing of America’

Courtesy: Aljazeera.org