FRAMING ISLAM AS A THREAT The Use of Islam by Some U.S. Conservatives as a Platform for Cultural Politics in the Decade after 9/11 David Douglas Belt A dissertation submitted to the faculty of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In Planning, Governance & Globalization Gerard Toal (Chair) Timothy W. Luke Joel Peters Ariel I. Ahram September 19, 2014 Alexandria, Virginia Keywords cultural politics, discourse, identity politics, Islamophobia, security writing Copyright 2014 by David D. Belt FRAMING ISLAM AS A THREAT The Use of Islam by Some U.S. Conservatives as a Platform for Cultural Politics in the Decade after 9/11 David Douglas Belt ABSTRACT Why, in the aftermath of 9/11, did a segment of U.S. security experts, political elite, media and other institutions classify not just al-Qaeda but the entire religion of Islam as a security threat, thereby countering the prevailing professional consensus and White House policy that maintained a distinction between terrorism and Islam? Why did this oppositional threat narrative on Islam expand and even degenerate into warning about the “Islamization” of America by its tiny population of Muslim-Americans—a perceived threat sufficiently convincing that legislators in two dozen states introduced bills to prevent the spread of Islamic law, or sharia, and a Republican Presidential front-runner exclaimed, “I believe Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it”? This dissertation takes these puzzles as its object of inquiry. Using a framework that conceptualizes discourses and their agents as fundamentally political, this study deepens the literature’s characterizations of this discourse as “Islamophobia,” the “new Orientalism,” the “new McCarthyism,” and so on by examining how it functioned politically as a form of cultural politics, and how such political factors played a role in its expansion in the decade after 9/11. The approach is syncretic, blending Foucauldian genealogy with its emphasis on power, a more interpretive Bourdieuan relational sociology, and synthetic social movement theory. First, it examines the discourse at its macro-level, in the historical and structural factors that formed its conditions of emergence; specifically: 1) the culturally-resident political framing structure that rendered this discourse meaningful and credible; 2) the politically-relevant social-structural resources that rendered it influential; and 3) the more historically contingent or eventful political openings or opportunity “structure” that otherwise enabled, supported, or incentivized it. Then, it examines this threat discourse at its micro-level, biographically profiling three of its more influential polemicists, analyzing their strategies of cultural politics. The study concludes that this threat discourse functioned as a distinctive strategy by the more entrepreneurial segments of the U.S. conservative movement, who—in the emotion-laden wake of 9/11—seized Islam as another opportune site to advance their ongoing project of cultural politics. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Any discretionary endeavor involving the investment of significant time and money has personal opportunity costs. My educational quest at Virginia Tech was undertaken while working full time and then radically changing careers from the Navy’s Special Operations Officer community to the security professional and intelligence communities. It was kept alive while trying to meet the special needs of one child going through the worst phase of a mental disorder, the needs of another who struggled to survive a life-threatening cancer, and the needs of four others who were dealing with those crises, amidst yet another cross-country military move and three other moves. And, it continued amidst yet two more crises that emerged during the dissertation phase. First, we finally settled by purchasing an old colonial only to find out that much of it had to be rebuilt from the foundation up due to termite damage that was neither identifiable nor covered in the termite insurance policy, thus forcing me to strap on the long-retired tool belt every night after work for a year to salvage it. Then, not long after restarting this dissertation, I was preliminarily diagnosed with stage III lung cancer and thought to have only eighteen months to live. After a three-month process of more definitive diagnosis, including lung surgery to remove two fast growing masses, the final diagnosis was a rare, cancer-like but slower progressing lung and—as it turned out—heart disease, for which there is no medical cure. Although the trials that have buffeted the Belt family during this formal education period have been turned into greater blessings, the added stress of it was obvious at times, impacting my wife of over thirty years, Cynthia, and our six children—Kristin, David, Beth, Jessica, Stephen and Hannah. You all know how much I love you, and how you continue to inspire and motivate me to do what I would likely not have attempted on my own. At the professional level, I want to thank the Deans at National Defense University and National Intelligence University—and especially Ambassador Cindy Courville. Your encouragement has meant so much and has helped keep my interest alive amidst working a full-time job on these two faculties, mentoring theses, conducting outreach, and performing strategic research. At the academic level, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my principal mentor at Virginia Tech, Professor Gerard Toal, and to my other committee members, Professors Tim Luke, Joel Peters, and Ariel Ahram. Gerard kindly encouraged me to take the time off during these trials, and then graciously reinvested himself to get the project going again. My life over the past few years has been immensely richer because of his scholarship, generosity, and patience. With these inadequate acknowledgements, let me preface this with something of my positionality. iii PREFACE Like the Space Shuttle Challenger mishap and Kennedy’s assassination before it, it seems that every adult has a story of where they were when they heard the news about “9/11”. For me, it was still early morning on the U.S. West Coast when the Chief of Staff for U.S. Navy Region Northwest called my home on a government–owned island and asked if I had turned on the television yet. At the time, I was the Commanding Officer of an ordnance mobilization activity, charged—among other things—with providing the missiles and bombs for the Pacific Fleet’s aircraft carriers, their Northwest-based guided-missile escorts, and for the prepositioning ships for the Marines, Army, and other branches of the military. Within a couple hours of the news, the first guided missile ship able to get underway was at this installation’s explosives operations pier and quickly loading surface-to-air missiles for the unthinkable—to shoot down other potentially hijacked commercial airliners still inbound over the Pacific that might be targeting Seattle. Within a couple more hours, the installation was beginning its first full mobilization for war … against an unidentifiable and unknown enemy. Not waiting for their mobilization orders to be drafted, dozens of reservists assigned to the naval base had started long-drives from as far away as Iowa. Four-hundred Coast Guardsmen of the port security contingent were ordered by Seattle’s Coast Guard District Thirteen to the island indefinitely to help safeguard the strategic assets from a threat not imagined: an enemy within. What only the day before had been familiar—an idyllic base of national park-like proportions for my family of eight—had become a strange Alamo-like garrison that was fending off attacks on our high-explosives operations from a new non-state enemy that we didn’t know, and which experts were imagining as lurking everywhere, with other sophisticated plans to strike. In the course of hours, everything we knew about national security seemed no longer valid, yet, valid knowledge that we might replace it with had not been formulated. Beyond the shores of this military island, the broader and basic national security paradigm had been similarly ruptured. In the words of Simon Dalby, “a strangely ominous silence filled the discursive space where political declarations were expected” (2003, 61). Not accommodated by existing discourses, the events of 9/11 seemed “unspeakable” (Steinert 2003), and the “expected sources” of meaning fell silent as the hegemonic Western security narratives collapsed (Croft 2006, 55). This unspeakableness of the moment was captured in London’s The Guardian, which on the front page ran a speechless photo of the fireball produced at the moment the second aircraft flew into the north tower, and on its second and third pages similarly printed no words used, but just a iv single black and white photograph stretching all the way across the double spread, of southern Manhattan enveloped in the dust and smoke (Campbell 2001). In the aftermath, expert after expert across the spectrum agreed: everything had changed. Indeed, immediately after the event, the phrase “9/11 changed everything” became popular (Henninger 2006). On the night of the attacks 74 percent of Americans viewed the events of 9/11 as a turning point, and that “things will change forever” (Ipsos-Reid 2001). This and other polls after the event suggested that it had instantly become a somatic marker, or a symbol of obsessive collective sense of trauma and loss, similar to the role of the Holocaust for Jews (Connolly 2002, 35; Ó Tuathail 2003). The magnitude of this affective resource can be seen in just the internet portion of the post-9/11 decade’s archive, which registered over a half-billion distinct entries of “9/11” and “September 11” and their variants. The dislocation was so complete, that James Der Derian (2002, 321) would lament over the emergent schema of “Before 9.11 and after 9.11”, noting that the rupture had even forced social scientists to “survey international as well as domestic politics by this temporal rift”.