America’s Muslim Anxiety: Lessons from The Third Jihad

'The NYPD’s Third Jihad controversy presents many questions for those who track the politics of and about Islam in the contemporary United States. For instance, one wonders what the airing of such a film in a “training”—presumably a context for teaching tactics and strategies in preventing crime—says about the institutional cultures of American police forces more generally. As scandals surrounding racial profiling on the part of police officers have consistently underscored, the inculcation of and reliance on prejudicial caricatures of criminals by the police constitutes a threat to citizenship in general. My concern here, however, is a broader theme related to The Third Jihad scandal: the Islamophobic conceit that American Muslims pose an imminent threat to American secularism.'

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