by global ideologies and a lack of any spatial or temporal limits: adversaries are not confined or locatable in delineated spaces and operations of combat are not constrained to a particular battlefield.22 But changes in the nature of conflict—a result of technological, tactical, and normative innovations—do not fully account for the emergence of the phenomenon of homegrown terrorism, particularly in how it is conceptualized, debated, and combated. Another key lineage integral to the problematic of homegrown terrorism is hinted at in the DHS definition above. It makes explicit something that the term “homegrown” itself implies: a foreign seed (of terror) takes root in American soil (in a manner beyond infiltration), the outgrowth of which can take multiple and shifting forms. Thus, as homegrown collapses the neat binary between foreign and domestic, it does so without fully negating either category—even if, as I will show, they do not exclusively manifest in forms of hyper-representation.
The Brown-Arab-Muslim-Other
The history of the contemporary terrorism refrain is simultaneously that of the foreign actor, the brown-Arab-Muslim-other. The oft-cited passage from French philosopher Alain Badiou’s Infinite Thought illustrates the intimate link between this figure and terrorism:
When a predicate is attributed to a formal substance (as is the case with any derivation of a substantive from a formal adjective) it has no other consistency than that of giving an ostensible content to that form. In “Islamic terrorism,” the predicate “Islamic” has no other function except that of supplying an apparent content to the word “terrorism” which is itself devoid of all content (in this instance, political).23
Here, “Islamic” is not only a designation of religiosity, but also a racialized marker of difference. I use this triple-hyphenated term, “brown-Arab-Muslim-other,” to indicate that these identity positions are often conflated and used interchangeably in discourses of threat.
Race or racialization in this context is a formation or process that goes beyond phenotype. Building on the work of Hannah Arendt, sociologist Sherene Razack explains that race thinking is a “structure of thought that divides up the world between the deserving and the undeserving according to descent.”24 In the war on terror this division is traced and cut along civilizational lines, naturalized by an emphasis on the incommensurable difference between cultures and informed by the binary structures of Orientalist thinking. Following the work of Palestinian American cultural critic Edward Said, the West/Orient dichotomy depicts the latter as a space of oppression, backwardness, irrationality, danger, and extremism, in contrast to Western freedom, forwardness, rationality, stability, and moderateness. Racial superiority, when not unabashedly explicit, is certainly inflected in such “culture talk” and is no less evident in liberal discourses that distinguish between “good” and “bad” Muslims. The result is often framed as regrettable, yet necessary (or even “respectable”) racism.25
The history of terrorism by no means began—and perhaps may not end—with the brown-Arab-Muslim-other. Nevertheless, the development of terrorism qua refrain and the marking of Arabs, Muslims, and other brown bodies as undeserving share important landmarks. At a time when terrorism was coming to the fore in foreign policy circles, the brown-Arab-Muslim-other figured prominently in the representation and narrativization of key events: the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Oil Embargoes of 1967 and 1973, the Munich massacre of 1972, and the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Within the United States, this link fomented suspicion of Arab and Muslim American communities, transforming invisible minorities into a problem population.26 For example, in 1972 President Nixon’s Operation Boulder targeted individuals of “Arabic-speaking descent” for intrusive surveillance and possible detention or deportation under the guise of fears of sabotage. The initiative was largely driven by assumptions regarding the stance of particular communities on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. A similar anxiety emerged a thousandfold in the wake of 9/11.27 The intimate cross-stitching of the geographically ever-shifting Middle East and terrorism in US thought is plainly evident in the 1987 Foreign Relations Authorization Act, which introduced a definition of international terrorism into the US Legal Code. The authors of the act made a point of stating, “Middle Eastern terrorism accounted for 60 percent of international terrorism.”28
Islam did not begin to be dogmatically associated with terrorism until the 1980s, a process that was equally serpentine. At a time when America witnessed anti-Semitic violence perpetrated by racist white supremacists, the killing of a prominent Arab American by the Jewish Defense League, and the first fatality of the Unabomber, an FBI report relegated the “Islamic threat” within the United States to a passing mention as “Other” lumped with Anti-Nuclear Activists and United Freedom Fighters.29 Moreover, those warring under the banner of Islam in the 1980s, the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, where heavily supported by the United States. Hailed as freedom fighters by President Ronald Reagan, they were positioned as allies of the United States against a godless evil empire. At the same time, in 1984, Benjamin Netanyahu warned the Second International Conference on Terrorism that the threat of terrorism came not only from Communism but also from Islamic extremism.30 These contradictory narratives are not unconnected. Financing not only weapons but promotional tours seeking volunteers for the Afghan warfront, the United States was an active agent in aiding the internationalization of religious rhetoric in and for war. Representing a policy of supporting groups who opposed Communism in the Middle East that stems back to the Eisenhower Doctrine of the 1950s, the “Islamic” terror Netanyahu warned of was birthed out of Communist hysteria.31
The end of the Cold War was accompanied by hawkish declarations of a “clash of civilizations.”32 The resulting shift in bipolar groupings transformed the brown-Arab-Muslim-other from a potential agent of sabotage into an inassimilable presence. The World Trade Center bombing in 1993 was further used to solidify a connection between a civilization/culture and a particular trademark of violence, an association so ingrained that the Oklahoma City bombing was initially reported as being “Middle Eastern” in style, with the suspects described as dark-haired, bearded, and of Mideastern origin.33 In effect, the concept of homegrown in American popular and political discourse was birthed in a fear of the brown-Arab-Muslim-other. The confusion sparked by the revelation that the perpetrators were white is one replayed over and over again, though with different inflections, in cases of homegrown terrorism.
The inassimilable character of the brown-Arab-Muslim-other was only further entrenched by the advent of “New Terrorism” just before the end of the twentieth century. For Walter Laqueur, an American historian of terrorism, the New Terrorism is the result of a shift over time in the motivations of terrorists, from Marx to Muhammad to Armageddon.34 These are, however, not exclusive categories. Rather, in security discourse the movement from one to the next signals an upping of the ante in the clash of civilizations—even if it is a tendency relegated to “bad” Muslims, as a clash within civilization. The antipathy and pathology of the “East” intensifies from a premodern condition and morphs into an antimodern fanaticism that is necessarily millenarian, ringing cries of annihilation. A hallmark of Schmitt’s absolute hostility, annihilation signals a change in the nature of the enemy (into what he calls a foe). In conventional conflict between nation-states, one’s adversary is evil because she is one’s adversary (which manifests for a variety of political reasons) and is thus targeted for defeat. In the ideological battles of absolute hostility, one’s adversary is an enemy in the first instance because she is evil. Such articulations are evident in contemporary government and terrorist communiqués alike. Thus, one’s adversary must be annihilated rather than defeated, a logic found in the often uttered (though historically disingenuous) statement, “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.” Here, the Double acquires its existentially threatening quality.
The existential threat posed by such an adversary exponentially intensifies when it manifests not only within US borders, but within people and places marked as familiar. When clearly bounded notions are confounded, different ways of making sense of the fanaticism of terrorism arise. In the context of homegrown terrorism, radicalization has most evidently resonated in recent years. Therein, this figure is often positioned as an agent of infiltration. But in other instances it is also invoked in more complex ways
