The Michigan Journal of Race and the Law published a special volume on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that featured articles by leading scholars on national security, immigration, criminal law, and race. Sahar Aziz’s article State Sponsored Radicalization conducts a comprehensive review of the literature that rebukes the dominant (fallacious) government narrative about ‘radicalization’ to terrorism. Not only are there no empirically based criteria for predicting who is more likely to engage in politically motivated violence, but increased religiosity of Muslims has no correlation to terrorist tendencies. And yet, the US government continued to rely on debunked theories of radicalization to craft predatory sting operations for the purpose of entrapping vulnerable Muslim men into fake terrorist plots.
State Sponsored Terrorism is the first in a series that empirically test the normative claim made in the author’s book The Racial Muslim that Muslim identity is securitized. Specifically, their religious identity racializes Muslims as a suspect race deserving of selective national security law enforcement, as opposed to a religious minority to be protected from religious persecution by the state or public. The series of articles interrogate the claim that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has been manufacturing a purported “Muslim homegrown terrorism” threat since 2001. The legal and policy claims are based on an empirical review of the author’s database of 612 federal terrorism-related cases against Muslim defendants between 2001 and 2021, of which at least 282 cases are sting operations. Further analysis of the sting operations is provided in Professor Aziz’s article Race, Entrapment and Manufacturing ‘Homegrown Terrorism,’ forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal.
– To read the special 20th Anniversary of 9/11 volume, click here.
