When a country’s national security is threatened, leaders seek first to protect its people above everything else. That was the case with the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” order by President Donald Trump. Despite the outlook as a security measure, this action led to widespread protests and legal challenges across the country the implications were clear. Moreover, the order was discriminatory and unconstitutional, as argued by various human rights organizations and civil liberties advocates with reference to the First Amendment’s religious freedom provision and the due process recommended in the Fifth Amendment. While the President and his advisories sought the shutdown as an immediate remedy, it tore down the US relations with Muslim-majority countries as the sentiments represented the whole US’s hostility to Muslims. Subsequently, it created a tense environment where pursuing educational and economic activities in the United States was halted and faced uncertainty. Therefore, the sentimental stereotypes that link certain communities with threats to national security, like the stereotype towards Islam as a religion and its people, undermine efforts to combat terrorism and other forms of violent extremism, could lead to harmful policies and actions, and perpetuate negative attitudes and prejudices towards these communities.
Undermining Efforts to Combat Terrorism and Other Forms of Violent Extremism
President Trump’s directive for a Muslim shutdown was considered a counter-terrorism policy that was executed wrongly. The action alienated Muslims, especially young people and was likely to feed and sustain terrorism. In layman’s language, such stereotype reinforces the belief that the communities stereotyped are meant to be oppressed, and this self-perception increases criminality to give what people think about them. Liebow (2016) explains that self-perception is one significant problem likely to engulf communities and various groups of people stereotyped given the conception as deviant agents. The moral identity is likely to disappear as destructive actions take over. For example, if they continue the assumption that Muslims are terrorists, it may fuel anger from some to perpetrate the actual action they are accused of. On the other hand, the sense of agency is also caught in the mix as it reduces with the depreciating moral identity. For instance, people of color are often victims of stereotypes with regard to criminality and moral deviance that they internalize to see themselves as outlaws among the morality police. The subsequent actions lead to the materializing of the stereotypes to become wrongdoers. In the same way, barring the entry of Muslims into the United States was an attempt at the moral identity and position as a group, which creates an excuse for terrorists to attack the country. Therefore, stereotypes like in Trump’s order were harming the efforts to combat terrorism.
The shutdown was motivated by the stereotype that Muslims are a threat to national security, as mentioned. Therefore, the action was a form of playing into the narrative of extremists. Extremist groups normally portray the US and the West as being at war with Islam, something that was proved when the shutdown was ordered. In other words, President Trump yielded to the narrative by proving them right. Subsequently, the stereotype provided the extremist and terrorist groups leverage through the propaganda tool that would recruit and radicalize disaffected Muslims to join the bandwagon of hate (Courtesy, Rane, and Ubayasiri, 2019). A step that is now regarded as a miscalculation led to international debates where some groups began questioning if the stereotypes would materialize if they were applied to Americans who have previously committed a mass shooting. Aside from the San Bernadino shootings, there have been citizens, Caucasians, who have gone rogue and threatened national security at one point, and they were not faced with such a ramification. The stereotypes are only there to show what has been going on for several generations and that an automatic assumption is made that a certain group, like Muslims, threatens national security. This is the point where accountability is required because hopping onto an event to reach a conclusion leads to a whole group living in fear of reciprocation from the public- like burning down residencies. In general, stereotypical ideas that a certain community is linked to threats to national security remove the fabric that ensures community cohesion to even affect efforts to combat terrorism and other extremist actions.
The internal action proposed by former president Trump is used herein as a predominant example of how stereotypical ideas cause problems for the country and its citizens. As a misidentified strategy to protect the country by linking a group, which is distributed all over the world, to a country’s threat to national security, it weakened international cooperation. For instance, when President Trump made the directive that Muslims be shut down from entering the United States, the action attracted tension from Islamic countries and their allies because countries cooperate in fighting the common enemy of terrorism and extremism (Choudhury and Fenwick, 2011). When a certain community is blamed for breaching the efforts to combat terrorism based on stereotypical ideas, it causes rifts between allies. Moreover, the US has been cooperating with the countries targeted by the ban to counter extremist activities, and such a proclamation set back their joint efforts. As such, the US stood at a bad place in its ability to address global threats as they were blamed for discrimination and fuelling the alienation of the Muslim community. Besides, the action and other stereotypes that have majorly implicated Muslims as threats to national security lie in the category of misidentified sources of a problem. If assuming Muslim-majority countries are the imminent threats to security would solve half of the terrorist attacks in the US and European countries, then there would be fewer to no attacks carried out by citizens by birth. Nonetheless, the focus on the nationality of the terrorists and extremists rather than their ideology fails to address the real source of national security threats.
Harmful Policies and Actions
The harm concept included in this discussion is the aftermath of the stereotypes against certain communities. If the Muslim shutdown held on for a longer time, it would be a harmful action, and its supporting policies would fuel anger. One of the significant problems likely to arise from harmful policies and actions include discrimination. When the perception is built and pushed that a particular community threatens national security, the members of that community are likely to face discrimination from the larger community who have been made to believe so. Such is unfair and counterproductive because such discriminatory actions take the form of racial profiling, surveillance, and harassment that would even deny these groups the opportunity to live and work to sustain their families. It has been determined that once it has started, discrimination has a lasting impact that not even activism and other reconciliation steps can erase what has been done. It is more dangerous when a prolific person starts such a dangerous stereotype that their followers take it as a social action to discriminate against other people.
Increased surveillance goes without saying as one of the problems that arise when a community is a victim of stereotypes like terrorist attacks. This surveillance is not limited to public places but to their houses and their loved ones as the groups are monitored most, if not at all, times. Such actions breach privacy and civil liberties, further alienating the communities. The surveillance, now racialized, is a fixation on Muslims, making them the perennial suspects even when they live rightfully amongst themselves and other communities. In a study on racialized surveillance, Alimahomed-Wilson (2019) found that FBI materials went as far as including disturbing assertions in training with the thought that “mainstream” Muslims in the US are most likely to be “terrorist sympathizers.” These training materials were leaked in 2011, and the majority of the training aspects with regard to Islam and Muslims were found to be Islamophobic distortions of the religion and the people. Muslims reportedly endured significant repression despite every other group experiencing an initial crackdown after 9/11. As Alimahomed-Wilson (2019) explains, the shift from exposing all people, Muslim and non-Muslim, all together to be fixated on Muslims alone as security threats marked the beginning of intense scrutiny of social activities, political beliefs, and religious practices of the community. The scrutiny included financial and governmental investment in monitoring and surveillance of the communities (Alimahomed-Wilson, 2019). When a person or a group knows they are being watched because they are assumed to be threats, it can lead to agitation and a negative response.
Travel restrictions are the consequent actions that result from harmful stereotypes. For instance, if other countries absorb the ideology that Muslims are the primary threats to national security, they would follow suit, one after the other, to put travel restrictions and bans in place, which would ruin international community relations. In the same way, the former President ordered a shutdown; it is restricting to movement through visa denial, which will affect education, trade, and employment opportunities, as the victims will reiterate. On the other hand, having bans and travel restrictions as counter-terrorism policies and practices will create a well of sympathy in various sections of society because they increase repression, stigmatize, and alienate a community group. In the latter section, stereotyping against a community as a national threat was presented as an action that could hinder efforts to counter terrorism and extremism. For this section, harmful policies and actions like travel bans create an opportunity for the threats to execute their actions. For instance, Choudhury and Fenwick (2011) report that groups like Al-Qaeda and other extremist groups in Western Europe use social and political marginalization (like Trump’s Muslim shutdown) and general discrimination to drive their narrative on why they need to attack more, hence recruitment of more people. Therefore, it is safe to state that stereotypical behaviors perpetrated by the head of state can spread to citizens, leading to laws that are applied unfairly or discriminatory.
Perpetuation of Negative Attitudes and Prejudices
Negative attitudes and prejudices summarize the prior points on harmful policies and actions and undermining efforts to combat terrorism and other forms of violent extremism. These negative attitudes and prejudice include; confirmation bias, dehumanization, and group polarization. The refugee crisis and other extremists attack on Western countries have led to a polarized opinion in the countries (Schmuck, Heiss, and Matthes, 2020). The opinions have become prevalent online and offline that crimes and assaults happen on a daily. Schmuck, Heiss, and Matthes (2020) ask the question of what extent or degree the discourses about Muslim immigration in both the media and social networking sites participate in the polarized opinions about the community. Mainstream media is a large contributor to the polarization through the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of Muslims (Schmuck, Heiss, and Matthes, 2020). Therefore, the threatening content often present can significantly contributed to a polarized opinion because the non-Muslim majority have limited direct contact with the minority. Research has paid little to no attention to how attitude congruence is in group polarization. In other words, news consumers already have an existing attitude, which is further reinforced by the information and news presented to them. There is uniformity when congruence interplays with existing attitudes and the news, somehow making prejudice prime. In fact, there has been no attempt to look at the influence of congruent and incongruent opinions about the Muslim community because they are predominantly portrayed as hostile.
On the other hand, prejudice is compounded by terms such as principled objection, which make certain behaviors against the Muslim community somewhat acceptable. As such, groups of people slowly get comfortable with the stereotypes reinforcing existing beliefs and attitudes, i.e., they seek out information that confirms their stereotypes and ignore information that contradicts them. Adelman and Verkuyten (2020) explain that anti-Muslim feelings are more common and widespread than negative attitudes toward other minority immigrant groups. Besides, the negative attitudes are connected to anti-Muslim feelings, and their strength increases with more people leaning towards confirmation bias. A worse combination arises from negativity and intolerance, especially political intolerance. Ignoring a person centered-approach to negativity towards the Muslim community, it can be found that significant figures shift other people’s beliefs, making them object to the communities. The resultant effect is the dehumanization of the community and making them internalize the oppression, which harms their morals with regard to their perception of criminality and reduced agency. Moreover, they become more alienated because of the perception of threat as they struggle with both social and political marginalization. Even law enforcement becomes a challenge because trust is lost, and engaging the community to build trust for effective policing is a long shot. At the end of the day, stigma becomes prevalent with a low acceptance rate, perpetuating negative attitudes and prejudices, leading to a cycle of discrimination and exclusion (Yilmaz, 2016).
Conclusion
Counter-terrorism policies and practices have various implications for certain communities, especially if they are based on stereotypes that the community or group is a threat to national security. Implied and sentimental stereotypes have been known to cause more harm than improving safety because they belittle a community and mostly alienate them. Therefore, they can undermine efforts to combat terrorism and other forms of violent extremism, perpetuate negative attitudes and prejudices towards these communities and push harmful policies and actions to an extent. As part of the remedy, applications of policies and laws should seek to be neutral and not target but identify a source and seek diplomatic strategies that will not come out as unfair or discriminatory.
References
Adelman, L., & Verkuyten, M. (2020). Prejudice and the Acceptance of Muslim Minority Practices: A Person-Centered Approach. Social psychology, 51(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000380
Alimahomed-Wilson, S. (2019). When the FBI knocks: Racialized state surveillance of Muslims. Critical Sociology, 45(6), 871-887. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920517750742
Choudhury, T., & Fenwick, H. (2011). The impact of counter-terrorism measures on Muslim communities. International review of law, computers & technology, 25(3), 151-181. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600869.2011.617491
Courty, A., Rane, H., & Ubayasiri, K. (2019). Blood and ink: the relationship between Islamic State propaganda and Western media. The Journal of International Communication, 25(1), 69-94. https://doi.org/10.1080/13216597.2018.1544162
Liebow, N. (2016). Internalized oppression and its varied moral harms: Self‐perceptions of reduced agency and criminality. Hypatia, 31(4), 713-729. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12265
Schmuck, D., Heiss, R., & Matthes, J. (2020). Drifting further apart? How exposure to media portrayals of Muslims affects attitude polarization. Political Psychology, 41(6), 1055-1072. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12664
Yilmaz, I. (2016). The nature of Islamophobia: Some key features. Fear of Muslims? International Perspectives on Islamophobia, 19-29. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29698-2_2
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