In hindsight, June 16 2015 was a turning point, a date critical to understanding today’s political tumult.
MERIP recently decided to re-publish Aïdi’s piece on the Save Darfur movement. In this post, Aïdi compares the current Black Lives Matter protests to the Darfur mobilisation.
But Trump’s brutal joining of the question of Hispanic migration with terrorism, of Islamophobia, and Hispanophobia would unleash a torrent of anti-Muslim speech on Spanish talk radio and social media. Miss Puerto Rico Destiny Vélez tweeted that Muslims “terrorise innocent Americans,” adding that, “Mexicans, Arabs, Jews and anything in between aren’t the same thing.”
Unsurprisingly, the Trump years have been characterised by a rise in Hispanic Islamophobia, including the tragic high-profile murders of Muslims by young Hispanics, most prominently of Nadra Hassanen in Washington, DC and Imam Maulana Akonjee and Thara Uddin at a mosque in Ozone Park, Queens. Unlike other hot spots across Africa, the Darfur tragedy reverberates deeply in the US because it is represented as a racial conflict between Arabs and indigenous Africans, because Sudan is where the “moral geographies” of black, Jewish and Christian nationalists overlap and because the Darfur crisis offers a unique opportunity to unite against the new post-Cold War enemy.
Since the Covid-19 crisis began in February, the global war on terror seems to have faded away; the war on the new “invisible enemy”—and the Trump administration’s hapless response—have dominated headlines. The absence of a Muslim bogeyman seems to have created space for new alliances and coalitions, as the establishment foreign policy hawks have receded from view.
Now, 15 years after Save Darfur, American power and prestige are vastly diminished. In 2005, the neo-cons calling for intervention in Sudan were in part vexed by China’s access to Sudan’s oil, as well as Beijing’s refusal to isolate the regime of former Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir.
As during the Darfur crisis, the Muslim grocer in the inner city is still a source of contention. In November 2005, liquor stores in Oakland owned by Muslim immigrants were vandalised In 2015, following the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson outside a store owned by an Indian immigrant, .
Ironically, some of this local opposition leads Muslim grocers to relocate to Hispanic neighborhoods, where immigrant merchants selling such products have been less likely to draw criticism. Despite the Islamophobic rhetoric from political hopefuls, a recent poll shows that among whites, blacks and Hispanics, Hispanic Americans score the lowest on the, with Hispanic Americans five times more likely to hold favorable opinions of Muslims than negative ones .
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