Islamophobia Case Negative - DDI 2015 MM

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Notes

Alt causes- foreign policy


Domestic policy trades of
Circum, surveillance not main issue
Ocular centric

1nc Terror da link


The plan drastically cuts all FBI programs- that drastically
reduces domestic counter-terrorism
Baer 09 (Robert Baer, Counterterrorism: A Role for the FBI, Not the CIA, Time
Magazine, http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1902335,00.html, AZ)
As CIA Director Leon Panetta journeys to Capitol Hill to testify this week, there is
reportedly a movement afoot in the Obama Administration that could diminish the
agency's role in counterterrorism. Dubbed the "global justice" initiative, the new
law-enforcement approach would give the FBI and the Department of Justice a more
prominent part in collecting evidence against and questioning terrorists and
bringing more cases to a civilian criminal trial, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The CIA will still collect intelligence on counterterrorism. And no one right now is
talking about putting a ban on CIA interrogations of terrorism suspects. But given
the right political climate, that is where this initiative could be heading. And that,
despite what some CIA loyalists might reflexively think, would be great news for the
agency. In fact, if I were Panetta, I would neatly gift wrap counterterrorism, put a
bow on the top, and hand it over to FBI Director Robert Mueller. It can't be any
clearer that renditions, harsh interrogations (if not torture) and secret prisons have
been a catastrophe for the CIA, promising to tie it up legally for years to come, not
to mention completely overshadow its successes. With the torture scandal sucking
up all the oxygen, who today remembers that it was the CIA in the months before
9/11 that was jumping up and down on the table warning that bin Laden was about
to attack us? (Read "The CIA's Silent War in Pakistan.") None of this is to say the FBI
can't do a good job at counterterrorism. On the contrary, the FBI investigated the
1998 African bombings, breaking open our understanding of al-Qaeda. Special
agents in the FBI's New York office came to know al-Qaeda as well as anyone in the
government. However, the FBI was forced to take a backseat when the CIA resorted
to abusive interrogations, depriving us of expertise we so badly needed. There's an
old piece of wisdom inside the Beltway, one that carries a lot more truth than most:
the FBI catches bank robbers, and the CIA robs banks. I suppose you have to swim
in this sea to really understand what this means. But to give you an idea, the other
day I was on the phone with an FBI agent about a wanted terrorist. I'd heard he was
holed up in some city in the Middle East. The FBI agent asked how I knew this. A
rumor, I answered, adding I had no idea whether there was any truth to it. I'm
certain the FBI agent took notes, but only to file them away. An FBI agent needs
solid, actionable information solid enough to arrest people, convict them in a
court of law and put them behind bars. In this case, the FBI needed an address, a
phone number, a license plate anything to act on. On the other hand, the CIA is
conditioned to steal anything that looks like a secret, even a suspect one, letting
analysts in Washington sort out the truth from fiction. The FBI and CIA cultures
couldn't be more diferent. The biggest mistake the Bush Administration made was
not criminalizing 9/11 and making the FBI the lead investigator. This would not have
stood in the way of Pakistan arresting 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
(K.S.M.). In a war of ideas, we would have been well served as a country to have put
K.S.M. on public trial, confronting him with damning evidence and exposing the

bloody insanity of a man who has caused the death of more Muslims than anyone in
modern history. But now, thanks to waterboarding and other interrogation abuses,
this option may be closed of to us. (Read "Why the CIA Turned Down Dick Cheney.")

1nc T
Definition Surveillance must be defined as both directed and
intrusive
Philip Gounev et al. (Tihomir Bezlov, Anton Kojouharov, Miriana Ilcheva, Mois
Faion, Maurits Beltgens, Center for the Study of Democracy, European Commission)
2015 Part 3: Legal and Investigative Tools http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/homeafairs/e-library/docs/20150312_1_amoc_report_020315_0_220_part_2_en.pdf
7.7.1. Definition There is no universal definition of surveillance. The various
definitions for surveillance generally depend on whether it is used as an umbrella
term or it is more narrowly defined. Advances in technology appear to be a factor in
defining what surveillance is, as they hold the potential to periodically enable
previously unavailable methods, techniques and tools for conducting surveillance
operations (i.e. geolocation/tracking, electronic surveillance, cloud technologies,
storage capacities). Analysis of information in the questionnaires indicates that MS
use diferent approaches in defining surveillance in their legislation. Some MS
diferentiate between simple observation conducted without technical means and
surveillance utilizing technical tools (AT, BE, FI, FR DE, LU). In other MS legislation
distinguishes short-term and long-term surveillance, wherein the defined periods
may vary from state to state (AT, DE, BE). The significance of making a distinction in
the periods for which surveillance is authorised is that most often short-term
surveillance is regulated more loosely and/or does not require a judicial oversight.
Some MS definitions isolate surveillance conducted on the premises of private
homes as a special circumstance, whereby it requires additional judicial
authorisation and oversight (AT, CZ, LU, UK). Overall, MS definitions may be grouped
into two main categories:120 General / broad definitions. In these instances
surveillance is more broadly defined as a special investigative tool that may be
executed through the utilisation of various technical and other means (BG, EE, HU,
LT, SI, FI, SK, SE). Specific examples include: - The method of intelligence data
gathering, when information collected identifying, recognizing and (or) watching an
object (LT). - Covert surveillance of persons, things or areas, covert collection of
comparative samples and conduct of initial examinations and covert examination or
replacement of things the information collected shall be, if necessary, video
recorded, photographed or copied or recorded in another way (EE). - Secret
observations made of a person with the purpose of retrieving information (FI).
Technically specific definitions. Some MS have opted for a more detailed and
specific approach to defining surveillance in their legislations. In such instances,
legal provisions often define surveillance along the logic of the types of technical
means and/or outcome from surveillance activities (BE, AT, FR, DE, LU, PT, SK, SE).
In general, the diferent types of surveillance methods, such as video surveillance,
photographic imaging, bugging, audio surveillance and geo-tracking may be
separately detailed in the definition of surveillance. For example, in France
geolocation/tracking and video-surveillance are regulated separately (FR). This is
because diferent types of surveillance are deemed to have potentially varied levels
of intrusion and may be regulated with diferentiated criteria, e.g. period for
surveillance, authorisation procedure, crime threshold (FR, SI). Surveillance

conducted using technical means is difficult to define as it covers a wide array of


activities and capabilities, as well as methods and techniques. A breakdown of some
the most used methods may help illustrate what is contained in the term.

Violation:
The most Islamophobic fbi policies are in education- the plan is
extra-topical
Weinsten 11 (Adam Weinstein, September 15th, 2011, Mother Jones, That
Islamophobic FBI Training Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg,
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/islamophobic-fbi-training-military, AZ)
Agents at the FBI's Quantico, Virginia, training grounds are taught that all
mainstream American Muslims are terrorist sympathizers in a cult that likes to
donate money to killers. That's according to a scoop by Wired's Spencer Ackerman,
who has exposed a series of amazingly clueless Powerpoint slides and documents
from the federales' training on Islam. If you haven't read his story yet, do so now.
Ackerman's report brings new light to an alarming problem that's been welldocumented since 9/11: American police officers, airport screeners, and soldiers
have no freaking clue how to deal with the distinction between the vast majority of
Muslims and the minisule minority that actively seek to do us harm. My MoJo
colleague Adam Serwer points out that local cops around the country have been
getting training that's even worse that the FBI's. He refers to an excellent March
Washington Monthly story detailing how Islamophobic trainers are collecting
homeland security dollars while spewing complete nonsense. For example: "When
you have a Muslim that wears a headband, regardless of color or insignia, basically
what that is telling you is 'I am willing to be a martyr," one trainer blathers. But it
goes way beyond that. Our Islamophobia-beat reporter, Tim Murphy, has detailed on
this site how Rep. Allen West (R-Fla) is championing a skewed, conspiratorial vision
of Islam to convince Americans that we're under attack. I've written about the
meager cultural training ofered to service members and contractors headed for
Iraq and Afghanistan. The materials would be humorous if they weren't so
disturbing: In them Arab men look suspiciously like Lego figures; they're described
as "illogical or irrational," paranoid, and prone to extremes, "perhaps due to the
harsh, desert environment that Arabs have lived in for thousands of years." And
that's just Iraqi Arabsjust wait 'til you read what they say about those dirty Kurds.
All of which is to say that, 10 years after the US government got really preoccupied
with Muslims of all stripes, from Iraqi Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites to Afghan Pashtuns,
Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and a couple hundred other ethnic and tribal identities (not
to mention Muslim-Americans)our civil servants are still taking a reductive, unfair,
and ultimately dangerous attitude toward them. Which may explain why we let
foreign governments lock them up and torture them, even if they're American
citizens. And perhaps it's why the FBI relies blindly on terrorism informants who
walk the fine between tracking potential terrorists and making them. If we
continue to miseducate the well-intending agents and soldiers who serve

at the tip of the spear, we shouldn't be surprised when that spear misses
its target.

C) thats a voter, 2 reasons


1 De-justifies the Resolution something more is needed to
solve, proving the resolution insufficient
2. Ground- the topic is written to provide negative ground isolated from the
affirmative extra T allows the affirmative to co-opt neg ground that doesnt include
surveillance, even solvency arguments radically disrupt the balance of ground

1nc PTX Agenda link


Obama will use his PC to fight the plan- Recent meeting proves
he supports surveillance of Muslims
Blumenthal 14 (Max Blumenthal: Writer for Alternet- Syndication
service and online community of the alternative press, featuring news
stories from alternative newsweeklies, magazines and web
publications, Obama Humiliates Muslim Guests at White House
Ramadan Event, Endorses Israels Gaza Assault and NSA Surveillance,
7/17/14, http://www.alternet.org/world/obama-humiliates-muslim-white-houseguests-endorsing-israels-gaza-assault-defending-nsa , Accessed: 7/17/15, RRR)
Obama endorsed
defended government spying on Muslim-Americans.
Alongside dozens of Muslim-American community activists and Muslim diplomats, the White House welcomed
Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer, an outspoken advocate of Israel's settlement
enterprise who has claimed Muslim and Arab culture is endemically violent . In
At the annual White House Iftar dinner commemorating the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, President Barack
Israels ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip and

the past, the annual Iftar dinner passed without much notice. Last year, President Barack Obama delivered a boilerplate speech to
the assembled crowd of Muslim-American community activists and Middle Eastern ambassadors about his eforts to spur
entrepreneurship. But this time, amidst a one-sided Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip that was about to claim its 200th death in just a
week, and which the US had backed to the hilt, the heat was on. While Obama prepared his remarks, calls rang out with
unprecedented intensity for invitees to boycott the July 14 ceremony. Among those who urged a boycott in protest of the Gaza
assault and ongoing government spying on Muslim-Americans was the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), an
established presence in Washington representing the countrys largest Arab-American advocacy group. Joining the boycott call was
Mariam Abu-Ali, the sister of Ahmed Abu Ali, a US citizen renditioned to Saudi Arabia for torture before being sentenced to life in

The White House Iftar is a slap in the face


to those in the Muslim community who have been victims of U.S. civil-rights and
human-rights abuses, Abu Ali wrote. It is an attempt by administration after
administration to whitewash the crimes of the U.S. government against Muslims by
painting a less-than-accurate picture of their relationship with the American Muslim
community. As established Muslim-American leaders like Laila Al-Marayati lined up to boycott (Al-Marayati rejected an
prison on dubious charges of threatening to kill George W. Bush.

invitation to the State Departments Iftar), others defended their presence at the ceremony. Most vocal among them was Rep. Keith
Ellison (D-MN), one of the two Muslim members of Congress. I disagree with the tactic, Ellison remarked in a statement released
by his office. It will not close Guantanamo Bay, guarantee a cease-fire between Israel and Palestine or undo the NSAs targeting of
Muslims. The Muslim Public Afairs Council (MPAC) echoed Ellison, insisting that the event would allow [them] to engage with
senior White House officials for a decent amount of time on substantive issues. While Muslim-American civil rights groups like the
Council on American Islamic Relations have assumed a more confrontational posture towards the White House and boycotted a
prayer breakfast with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in protest of his support for NYPD surveillance of Muslims,
MPAC has taken an altogether diferent tack. Its role as a paid consultant on the cable TV series, Tyrant, was perhaps the best
example of its accommodationist stance. Produced by Howard Gordon, the creator of 24 and Homeland, the show starred a
white actor playing a pathological Arab dictator who ruled over the deeply dysfunctional fictional nation of Abuddin. Even
mainstream TV critics derided the series as unbearably Orientalist, with the Washington Posts Hank Stuever describing it as a
stultifyingly acted TV drama stocked with tired and terribly broad notions of Muslim culture in a make-believe nation on the brink.
Leading up to the White House Iftar, a leader of a major Muslim advocacy organization told me on background that MPAC was
bleeding support, especially from younger activists. At the Iftar dinner, Obama launched into a defense of Israels assault on the
Gaza Strip, declaring, I will say very clearly, no country can accept rockets fired indiscriminately at citizens. And so, weve been
very clear that Israel has the right to defend itself against what I consider to be inexcusable attacks from Hamas. He went on to
claim against all evidence that his administration had worked long and hard to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and that it
had emphasized the need to protect civilians, regardless of who they are or where they live. Ali Kurnaz, the central regional

Obamas remarks provoked deep


discomfort, with attendees exchanging disturbed looks and rolling their eyes in
astonishment. No one walked out in protest, however. After the dinner, I overheard at least three diferent exchanges
director for the Florida-based Emerge USA, was in the audience. He told me that

attendees pointing out that Palestinians should have a right to defend themselves too, Kurnaz recalled. Like many others who
joined the dinner, Kurnaz was not aware that Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer had been invited. Dermer was a longtime confidant of
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the son of the Republican former Mayor of Miami Beach. This year, Dermer broke
diplomatic protocol by appearing at a fundraiser for the Republican Jewish Committee, helping to raise money for a partisan
organization dedicated to undermining Obamas agenda.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of Dermers

presence at the Iftar dinner was his stated belief that a cultural tendency towards
belligerency is deeply embedded in the culture of the Arab world and its foremost
religion. According to Kurnaz, Dermer spent the evening isolated in the White Houses Green Room adjacent to the main
reception area, where he milled around mostly without company. None of the activists invited to the dinner approached him. When

They confronted him on the


issue of domestic spying, an issue that took on renewed immediacy after
revelations by the Intercept that the NSA and FBI has spied on leading MuslimAmerican civil rights activists. Obama attempted to remind them that the spying
had begun under his predecessor, Bush, but defended the practice nonetheless,
denying that the NSA had violated any laws.
dinner began, Kurnaz said Obama was unusually candid with those seated at his table.

Obama will fight the plan- It undermines administrations


counterterrorism efforts
Ackerman 14 (Spencer Ackerman: National security editor for Guardian, White
House Iftar dinner guests press Obama on surveillance of Muslims, The Guardian,
7/16/2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/16/white-house-iftar-obamasurveillance-muslims, Accessed: 7/17/14, RRR)
Attendees of a White House dinner this week celebrating a Muslim holiday attempted to leverage their
direct interaction with Barack Obama into a presidential commitment to discuss
widespread and controversial surveillance of their communities. They left feeling they had Obama's
interest, but not much more. Less than a week after the Intercept, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, showed US Muslim activists and
attorneys had been targeted for surveillance, Obama gathered legislators, diplomats and US Muslim community leaders to the White House on Monday

Obama stressed the value of


pluralism, sidestepping the surveillance controversy . Not everyone was satisfied
with the omission. Some of the people who attended were signatories of a letter sent to the White House in the wake of the Intercept
night for an Iftar dinner, the sunset meal during Ramadan. In remarks released by the White House,

story urgently requesting a meeting with Obama. Without that commitment yet in hand, took the opportunity to raise the issue with Obama personally at
the Monday dinner. "I specifically asked the president if he would meet with us to discuss NSA spying on the American Muslim community. The president
seemed to perk up and proceeded to discuss the issue, saying that he takes it very seriously," said Junaid Sulahry, the outreach manager for Muslim
Advocates, a legal and civil rights group. Obama was non-committal, Sulahry said, but displayed "a clear willingness to discuss the issue." Hoda
Elshishtawy, the national policy analyst for the Muslim Public Afairs Council, said that she brought it up as part of a "table-wide discussion" on post-9/11

That tension
has plagued the Obama administration's domestic counterterrorism or, as it
prefers, "countering violent extremism" for its entire tenure. The departments of justice and homeland
surveillance of US Muslims. "Our communities can't be seen as suspects and partners at the same time," Elshishtawy said.

security lead outreach eforts in Muslim and other local communities, stressing vigilance against radicalizing influences and dialogue with law
enforcement. Yet Muslim communities labor under widespread suspicion of incubating terrorism. Surveillance from law enforcement and US intelligence is

The Federal Bureau of


Investigation compiles maps of Muslim businesses and religious institutions, without
suspicion of specific crimes. The mixed message comes amidst the freight of a foreign policy featuring drone strikes in Muslim
robust, from the harvesting of digital communications to the recruitment of informants inside mosques.

countries, a reluctance to foreclose on indefinite detention that functionally is only aimed at Muslims, and difficulty concluding the war in Afghanistan all
of which have strained relations with American-Muslim communities. Some of those community leaders have already come under fire for attending the
White House dinner. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee urged a boycott over the surveillance and administration support for Israel during
the current Gaza ofensive, rejecting what it called "normalization of the continuous breach of our fundamental rights." Representatives of organizations
that rejected the boycott argued that they can exercise greater influence through access than through rejection. "Our strategy is to worth through the

The White House declined comment on what it


called "private conversations at a closed press event."
system," said Farhana Khera, Muslim Advocates' executive director.

1nc PTX Elections link


Conservatives are hardliners on Muslims- the plan would isolate their
base
Dean Obeidallah, reporter for daily beast , "For Republicans, Muslims Will Be the Gays of 2016,"
Daily Beast, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/21/for-republicans-muslims-willbe-the-gays-of-2016.html)//GV
Bobby Jindal isnt stupid enough to believe in Muslim no-go zones. Hes working the base, which is more than willing to be worked. Now that

Republicans realize that the fight over gay marriage is over, theyre pivoting back to the old reliable: Muslims. Its true
that Muslim-bashing among Republicans is hardly new, but I think that as 2016 approaches were going to see even more of it as
candidates try to outflank one another. The latest example was LouisianaGovernors Bobby Jindals speech on Monday in
London. Jindal told the audience that there are no-go zones in Europe where Muslims have in essence carved out Islamic autonomous zones that
are ruled by Koranic law and where non-Muslims fear to tread. His point, of course, was to warn Americans that Muslims could try the same thing in
the United States. Now if that concept sounds familiar its because last week Fox News served up this same rancid red meat to its viewers. Some Fox
News anchors claimed these so-called no-go zones existed in parts of France. And Fox News terrorism expert Steve Emerson even went as far as to
say that Birmingham, England, the nations second biggest city with more than one million people, was a totally Muslim city where non-Muslims dont
go in. The backlash to these comments was swift. Even British Prime Minster David Cameron responded, When I heard this, frankly, I choked on my
porridge and I thought it must be April Fools Day. This guy is clearly a complete idiot. Fox

News stirring up fear of Muslims is

nothing new. In fact, in my view its part of Foxs business model since its viewers hold the most negative views of Muslims of any cable news
audience. Fox is simply giving their viewers what they want to see. But a few days ago, Fox did something truly shocking. They apologized for making
the claims about Muslim-controlled no-go zones in Europe. In fact, they apologized not once, but four times, and admitted unequivocally that these
no-go zones dont even exist. Yet even though the Fox retractions occurred days before Jindal delivered his speech, that didnt stop him from
asserting the same baseless claims. After his speech, Jindal was asked by a CNN reporter for specifics on where exactly these no-go zones are located.

So
what do you do if you are a Republican candidate seeking conservative votes? Simple. Bash
Muslims. We are truly an easy target. For those unfamiliar with Jindal, hes no Louie Gohmert. Hes an Ivy League graduate and a
Rhodes scholar. Jindals remarks were not a mistake, but rather part of a calculated strategy to garner
support from more conservative Republicans for an expected2016 presidential run. Now, in the
past, candidates trying to garner support from these right wing voters could use opposition to
gay marriage to curry favor. As conservative James Kirchick noted in an article he penned for The Wall Street Journal in 2008, the
Jindal, in what looked almost like a sketch from Saturday Night Live, hemmed and hawed, finally responding: I think your viewers know.

Republican Party has a long history of its candidates using not just opposition to gay marriage, but also anti-gay rhetoric to attract support from the
GOP Base. Kirchick went on to urge Republicans to kiss gay-bashing goodbye. But we still saw this bigotry in the 2012 race. For example, Rick Perry
ran a campaign commercial that said you know theres something wrong with this country when gays can openly serve in the military. Polls, however,
now show a majority of Americans support gay marriage. And even the Mike Huckabees of the GOP would have to admit that after the Supreme Court
announced Friday that it is considering the constitutionality of same-sex marriage this term, gay marriage will likely soon be the law of the land.
Bottom line: gay

marriage will probably be dead as an issue capable of rallying


conservative voters. So what do you do if you are a Republican candidate seeking conservative votes? Simple. Bash Muslims. We
are truly an easy target. First, Muslims are a small percentage of our nations population at approximately 1
to 2 percent. Second, there are horrible Muslims who do commit terror in the name of our faith, which
does offer cover for anti-Muslim bigotry. Third, we still dont have many allies outside of our community
that stand with us. Sure, we have some interfaith supporters. But when ant-gay comments are made, like in the case of Duck Dynastys Phil
Roberson in 2013, the response by the left was swift and united. But with anti-Muslim bigotry, we dont see that. We see silence from many on the left,
including from most Democratic elected officials. And worse, we see some outright anti-Muslim fear mongering by so-called liberals like Bill Maher. If
Im right, what can we expect to see as the 2016 presidential race heats up? More speeches like Jindals designed to stir up fear with no factual support.
His remarks were applauded by conservative ++Larry Kudlow in The National Review. Even more comments like the ones recently made by

Oklahoma State Representative John Bennett that Muslims are a cancer that must be cut of
our country and that Muslim-Americans are not loyal to the United States but to the
constitution of Islam. Bennett received a standing ovation from the conservative audience that
heard these remarks, and the Oklahoma GOP Chair even backed him up. And possibly even more comments like the one made by newly sworn in
member of Congress Jody Hice who stated that Islam is not a religion and doesnt deserve First Amendment protection. Was there any backlash from
GOP leaders to this remarks? Nope, in fact people Red States Erick Erickson even spoke at one of his fundraisers and wrote he was proud to support
Hice. This is a far cry from the 2008 presidentialrace when John McCain countered anti-Muslim remarks made by a supporter at one of his campaign
rallies. My hope is that Im wrong. But after seeing close to a thousand people over the weekend protesting a Muslim-American event in Texas that was
ironically organized to counter extremism, Im not so optimistic. The more conservative parts of the GOP base tend to vote in higher numbers in the
primaries. So dont

be surprised when you see Republican candidates trying to get their attention
with this cut of red meat.

1nc case ev
Islamophobia is inherent in civil society- the aff distracts from
social movements, which is key to solve
Collins 15 (Kathryn Collins, March 6th, 2015, The Rising Trend of Islamophobia,
Distraction Magazine, http://www.distractionmagazine.com/2015/03/06/the-risingtrend-of-islamophobia/, AZ)United States citizens are hard to recognize; accents, skin tones,
backgrounds, genetics are all meaningless. Whether by birth or via test, an American citizen is
identifiable primarily by his or her commitment to ideals set forth more than two centuries ago. Any
7th grader can provide the gist of the guarantees set forth by the Founding Fathers; that citizens
ought to be free from government involvement in religious worship, free speech, peaceful assembly
and petition, and harassment; but imagine a scenario where the people who created this credo to
protect themselves and their descendants chose to marginalize and mistreat groups with different
appearances or beliefs. It isnt that hard, is it? Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, Irish

At prestigious, private
institutions of higher education, it may be easy to tsk, ofer a genuinely sympathetic
head shake, and remark on how unenlightened previous generations were, while
marveling at how people could be so cruel and downright ignorant. A large Muslim
population is asking that very question right now. There has been a recent wave of
anti- Muslim sentiments on the international scale. It is leaving many followers of Islam
feeling slighted and frightened for their safety. On February 10th of this year, three
college students (Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Razan Mohammad
Abu-Salha) were fatally shot in their home in Chapel Hill , North Carolina. The
Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, Homosexuals the list goes on.

neighbor who allegedly shot them has been arrested. There is widespread speculation that this was a
hate crime, based on the content of his social media accounts and one of the victims telling a relative
she believed the man resented them for their religion and heritage. The killings occurred after
President Obama asked congressional approval for authorization to use military force to fight the
Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Not to mention the murder of 17 people in France by Islamist terrorists
last month. Could it be a coincidence? That this was truly a horrible incident, a squabble over parking
blown unbelievably out of proportion? That absolutely could be the case. However, in the time since

there have been in increase in similar incidents.


Some examples can be seen below: 2/13/2015: A fire broke out at an
Islamic community and education center in southeast Houston; hours later
arson police discovered accelerant was used. The assistant imam said the night
before someone had driven by screaming mocking chants. 2/17: The entrance of the Islamic
School of Rhode Island in West Warwick was tagged with orange graffiti
reading Now this is a hate crime, pigs, and offensive references to Muhammad.
the death of the three students,

The schools board of trustees, Hilmy Bakri, said the school had never before been the subject of
vandalism. 2/17/2015: Muslims get out emblazoned across the outside of Skyview Junior High School

Many mosques in Ohio received threatening


phone calls with exceptionally graphic and disturbing language from the
in Bothell, Washington. 2/17/2015:

same individual. 2/17/2015: A man threatening to bomb a restaurant specializing in Middle Eastern
food and an Islamic center in Austin, TX was arrested. 2/19/2015 :

An Arab-American man
was speaking to his children in Arabic while grocery shopping at a Kroger in
Dearborn, Michigan when he was assaulted by two white men who were enraged upon overhearing

A witness said she heard ISIS, I hear terrorist, I hear go back to


your country and raghead This sort of thing is not new. In December, Abdisamad
him.

Sheikh-Hussein, 15, was run over by an SUV outside a Somali community center in Kansas City. The
same center that called the police after earlier witnessing a lingering SUV bearing the painted phrase
Islam is worse than Ebola. Whats more worrying than the fact that this isnt new, is the fact that this might
not be newsworthy. The coverage of the attacks in France lasted significantly longer than the coverage
of the three students deaths. In order to form a more perfect union, has this nation enabled
Islamophobia? Hate crimes are generally not reported, and the percentage of hate crimes not reported

by Muslims is even higher, as FBI reports show they are among the most profiled and targeted groups
in the United States, especially since 9-11. To try and ascribe one cause to Islamophobia would be to
try and justify prejudice. The logical mind rejects and the determined mind refuses to accept or seek
out knowledge that would threaten or discredit their ingrained understanding. The news has been
permeated by the ascendance of a new terror group who has seized headlines and world attention

A Brookings Institution poll


published in January revealed that 14% of Americans believe the Islamic
State has the support of a majority of Muslims worldwide . In comparison to the
primarily by beheading Western aid workers and journalists.

world, Americans might argue that Muslims dont have it so bad! Its not like Belgium or France with
bans on veils or headscarves. However, at the very least, there is an awareness of the community and

Uncomfortable subjects need discussion and


power actors to advocate on their behalf before American Muslims
before any optimistic, tolerant Americans can anticipate any real change.
a very verbal discourse about rights.

The plan doesnt solve islamophobic foreign drone strikes


MBD 13 (July 20th, 2013, Political Blindspot, A List of Muslim Children Killed by US
Drone Strikes, http://politicalblindspot.com/a-list-of-muslim-children-killed-by-usdrone-strikes/, AZ)
A recent Marine Times article ran the alarming headline Some Afghan kids arent
bystanders on December 3, reporting on the death of three Muslim children in
Afghanistan. They were apparently targeted by a U.S. military drone because they
appeared to be digging a hole in a road. Army Lt. Col. Marion Carrington, quoted in
the article, said that It kind of opens our aperture that children are being used in
the conflict. In addition to looking for military-age males, its looking for children
with potential hostile intent. Why specify that these are Muslim children?
Because to the Muslim world, these attacks look like what they are increasingly
looking like to activists in the West: a Crusade. The targeting of Muslim children
is not incidental. There are no examples of Christian, Jewish, or even
Buddhist children being the sole victims of any US war in recent history.
The fact that conflict after conflict, war after war, in recent decades, the targets are
Muslim and when they are, there seems to be no focus on reducing the civilian
(child) death toll is anything but incidental to the Muslim world. Proponents of the
Drone Wars, including President Barack Obama, claim that drone strikes are precise
and only target terrorists. A study, however, from Columbia Law Schools Human
Rights Institute finds that the number of Pakistani civilians killed in drone strikes
significantly and consistently underestimated and that as many as 98% of those
killed by drone strikes are civilians. While it is ultimately impossible to get exact
numbers, this means that for every terrorist killed by a drone strike, anywhere
between 10 and 50 civilians are killed. Obama has authorized 193 drone strikes in
Pakistan four times the amount authorized by George W. Bush. According to Global
Research, over the past 4 years Obama has authorized attacks in Pakistan which
have killed more than 800 innocent civilians and just 22 Al-Qaeda officers. That
constitutes at least 36 civilians per target.

Capitalism is the root cause of racism


McLaren and Torres 99 (Peter Mclaren, professor of education at U of California, and
Rudolfo Torres, Professor of Planning, Policy, and Design, Chicano/Latino Studies, and Political
Science, Racism and Multicultural Education: Rethinking Race and Whiteness in Late
Capitalism, Chapter 2 of Critical Multiculturalism: Rethinking Multicultural and Antiracist
Education, edited by Stephen May, p.49-50, Questia)

According to Alex Callinicos (1993), racial

differences are invented. Racism occurs when the characteristics


which justify discrimination are held to be inherent in the oppressed group. This form of
oppression is peculiar to capitalist societies; it arises in the circumstances surrounding industrial
capitalism and the attempt to acquire a large labour force. Callinicos points out three main
conditions for the existence of racism as outlined by Marx: economic competition between workers;
the appeal of racist ideology to white workers; and efforts of the capitalist class to establish and
maintain racial divisions among workers. Capital's constantly changing demands for different
kinds of labour can only be met through immigration. Callinicos remarks that 'racism offers for workers of the
oppressing race the imaginary compensation for the exploitation they suffer of belonging to the ruling nation' (1993, p. 39).
Callinicos notes the way in which Marx grasped how 'racial' divisions between 'native' and 'immigrant' workers could weaken the
working-class. United States' politicians like Pat Buchanan, Jesse Helms and Pete Wilson, to name but a few, take advantage of this
division which the capitalist class understands and manipulates only too well-using racism effectively to divide the working-class.
At this point you

might be asking yourselves: Doesn't racism pre-date capitalism? Here we agree with
Callinicos that the heterophobia associated with precapitalist societies was not the same as modern racism. Pre-capitalist
slave and feudal societies of classical Greece and Rome did not rely on racism to justify the use
of slaves. The Greeks and Romans did not have theories of white superiority. If they did, that must have
been unsettling news to Septimus Severus, Roman Emperor from Ad 193 to 211, who was, many historians
claim, a black man. Racism emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from a key
development of capitalism-colonial plantations in the New World where slave labour stolen from Africa
was used to produce tobacco, sugar, and cotton for the global consumer market (Callinicos, 1993).
Callinicos cites Eric Williams who remarks: 'Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the
consequence of slavery' (cited in Callinicos, 1993, p. 24). In effect, racism emerged as the ideology of the plantocracy. It
began with the class of sugar-planters and slave merchants that dominated England's Caribbean colonies. Racism developed out of
the 'systemic slavery' of the New World. The

'natural inferiority' of Africans was a way that Whites justified


enslaving them. According to Callinicos: Racism offers white workers the comfort of believing
themselves part of the dominant group; it also provides, in times of crisis, a ready-made scapegoat, in the shape of
the oppressed group. Racism thus gives white workers a particular identity, and one which unites them
with white capitalists. We have here, then, a case of the kind of 'imagined community' discussed by Benedict Anderson in
his influential analysis of nationalism. (1993, p. 38) In short, to abolish racism in any substantive sense, we need
to abolish global capitalism.

Their ethics for the other is a tool of capitalist manipulation used to justify the
worst types of racism- the plan turns itself
iek, 1997 (Slavoj, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, also a senior researcher at the Institute
for Advanced Study in the Humanities, in Essen, Germany, Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural
Logic of Multinational Capitalism New Left Review I/225, September-October, <
http://newleftreview.org/?view=1919>)

What one should do is thus reassert the

old Marxist critique of reification: today, emphasizing the


depoliticized objective economic logic against the allegedly outdated forms of ideological
passions is the predominant ideological form, since ideology is always self-referential, that is, it
always defines itself through a distance towards an Other dismissed and denounced as ideological. [11]
Jacques Rancire gave a poignant expression to the bad surprise which awaits todays postmodern ideologues of the end
of politics: it

is as if we are witnessing the ultimate confirmation of Freuds thesis, from Civilization and

its Discontents, on how, after every assertion of Eros, Thanatos reasserts itself with a vengeance. At the very moment when,

according to the official ideology, we are finally leaving behind the immature political passions
(the regime of the politicalclass struggle and other out-dated divisive antagonisms) for the
mature post-ideological pragmatic universe of rational administration and negotiated consensus,
for the universe, free of utopian impulses, in which the dispassionate administration of social
affairs goes hand in hand with aestheticized hedonism (the pluralism of ways of life)at this very moment,
the foreclosed political is celebrating a triumphant comeback in its most archaic form: of pure,
undistilled racist hatred of the Other which renders the rational toler-ant attitude utterly impotent.
[12] In this precise sense, contemporary postmodern racism is the symptom of multiculturalist late
capitalism, bringing to light the inherent contradiction of the liberal-democratic ideological project.
Liberal tolerance condones the folklorist Other deprived of its substancelike the multitude of
ethnic cuisines in a contemporary megalopolis; however, any real Other is instantly denounced
for its fundamentalism, since the kernel of Otherness resides in the regulation of its jouissance: the real Other is
by definition patriarchal, violent, never the Other of ethereal wisdom and charming customs.
One is tempted to reactualize here the old Marcusean notion of repressive tolerance, reconceiving
it as the tolerance of the Other in its aseptic, benign form, which forecloses the dimension of the
Real of the Others jouissance. [13]

Fusion centers local nature makes regulation impossible- the


plan does nothing
ONeil 8 political science graduate student at the University of California Los

Angeles (UCLA) Previously, iobhan served as the analyst for domestic security and
intelligence at the Congressional Research Service (CRS). She spent five years
working in homeland security serving as the deputy chief of the Intelligence Bureau
of the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness (OHSP) (April 2008,
Siobhan, Homeland Security Afairs, The Relationship between the Private Sector
and Fusion Centers: Potential Causes for Concern and Realities,
https://www.hsaj.org/articles/134)
Given that fusion centers are entities established by states and localities to
serve their own law enforcement, emergency response, and homeland security

needs, and compounded by the sensitivities associated with federalism, the


federal government is in a difficult position of balancing its interests and
respecting the local nature of fusion centers. As such, the federal
government has been understandably hesitant to place requirements on
fusion centers. Instead, federal agencies have produced guidelines, which
have not been compulsory, to include the National Strategy for Information
Sharing and Fusion Center Guidelines. 8 While these documents address some of
the tactical and operational concerns related to fusion centers, they are often
vague to a fault and fail to provide the comprehensive vision for fusion
centers as part of the nations homeland security posture.
Failure to create a consensus on the role, structural requirements, and
responsibilities for fusion centers is apt to increase the potential for
ineffectiveness, which threatens the viability of fusion centers. If fusion centers
fail to demonstrate their worth and strengthen and augment our nations homeland
security eforts, political support and external agency engagement with these
centers is likely to decline. Moreover, potential civil liberties abuses could damage
fusion centers credibility and undermine their public support. It has rightfully been
warned that even rumors of impropriety and civil liberties abuses associated with a
single fusion center can cause irreparable damage to the reputation of all fusion
centers nationwide. This would be unfortunate given the potential for fusion centers
to provide public safety and homeland security benefits to both local communities
and the nation.

Businesses sharing citizens information with the government


is a new privacy threat
Fang 15
Lee Fang, a journalist with a longstanding interest in how public policy is influenced
by organized interest groups and money, 04/01/15, "How Big Business Is Helping
Expand NSA Surveillance, Snowden Be Damned," Intercept,
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/01/nsa-corporate-america-push-broadcyber-surveillance-legislation//SRawal
For all its appeal to corporations, CISA represents a major new privacy threat to
individual citizens. It lays the groundwork for corporations to feed massive
amounts of communications to private consortiums and the federal
government, a scale of cooperation even greater than that revealed by Snowden. The law also breaks
new ground in suppressing pushback against privacy invasions ; in exchange for
channeling data to the government, businesses are granted broad legal immunity from privacy lawsuits potentially leaving
consumers without protection if companies break privacy promises that would otherwise keep information out of the hands of
authorities.

Ostensibly, CISA is supposed to help businesses guard against


cyberattacks by sharing information on threats with one another and with
the government. Attempts must be made to filter personal information out
of the pool of data that is shared. But the legislation at least as marked up by the Senate
Intelligence Committee provides an expansive definition of what can be construed
as a cybersecurity threat, including any information for responding to or
mitigating an imminent threat of death, serious bodily harm, or serious
economic harm, or information that is potentially related to threats
relating to weapons of mass destruction, threats to minors, identity theft,
espionage, protection of trade secrets, and other possible offenses. Asked
at a hearing in February how quickly such information could be shared
with the FBI, CIA, or NSA, Deputy Undersecretary for Cybersecurity Phyllis Schneck replied, fractions of a
second. Questions persist on how to more narrowly define a cybersecurity threat, what type of personal data is shared, and which

government agencies would retain and store this data. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who cast the lone dissenting vote against CISA on
the Senate Intelligence Committee, declared the legislation a surveillance bill by another name. Privacy advocates agree. The

lack of use limitations creates yet another loophole for law enforcement to
conduct backdoor searches on Americans, argues a letter sent by a coalition of privacy
organizations, including Free Press Action Fund and New Americas Open Technology Institute. Critics also argue that CISA would not
have prevented the recent spate of high-profile hacking incidents. As the Electronic Frontier Foundations Mark Jaycox noted in a
blog post, the JPMorgan hack occurred because of an un-updated server and prevailing evidence about the Sony breach is

the intelligence community and corporate


America have this year unified behind the bill. For a look into the breadth of the corporate
increasingly pointing to an inside job. But

advocacy campaign to pass CISA, see this letter cosigned by many of the most powerful corporate interests in America and sent to

another letter, reported in the Wall Street Journal, signed by general


counsels of more than 30 different firms, including 3M and Lockheed
Martin Corp.
legislators earlier this year. Or

Link to immigration is a joke lynch et al ev is talking about all


undocumented immigrants, not just muslims- the plan doing
that would be not T, also therefore none of their ev say
immigration is racist

2nc alt cause ev


(meh)FBI tactics are not indicative of greater societyislamophobia is actually very low in the squo
Spencer 14 (Decenber 17, 2014, Robert spencer, New FBI hate crime stats show
yet again that claims about Islamophobia are
false,http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/12/new-fbi-hate-crime-stats-show-yet-againthat-claims-about-islamophobia-are-false, AZ)
New FBI hate crime stats show yet again that claims about Islamophobia are false DECEMBER 17,
2014 2:34 PM BY ROBERT SPENCER No violence or hatred directed at an innocent Muslim or non-Muslim is ever

there is far less of it than Islamic supremacist groups and the


mainstream media would have you believe. We heard it yet again not just after, but
during the Sydney jihad hostage crisis: there would be a backlash against
Muslims, a wave of Islamophobic hate crimes. There has not been, of course. Leftists
justified. The fact is that

and Islamic supremacists use the specter of Islamophobic hate crime to shut down honest discussion of how
jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism, and intimidate people into

The FBIs newly released hate crime


statistics for 2013 ofer a fresh example of how reality refuses to conform to the
dubious narrative of widespread Muslim victimization at the hands of American bigots. As in
previous years, most hate crimes were not religiously motivated, most religiously
motivated hate crimes were anti-Jewish, and Muslims sufered fewer total incidents
thinking that there is something wrong with resisting jihad terror.

than many groups and fewer per capita than gays or Jews. Anti-Islamic crimes did not involve greater violence than

Of the 5,928 incidents of hate


crime tabulated in 2013, 135 (2.3 percent) were anti-Islamic, an increase of five over the
others and have not become more frequent. A glance at the details:

prior year but still slightly below the annual average of 139 from 2002 to 2011. The small rise in recorded antiIslamic incidents could be attributable to improved data collection rather than a true uptick. Reports submitted by
law enforcement agencies covered a population of 295 million Americans in 2013, 18.6 percent higher than in 2012.
There were 1,031 incidents inspired by religion last year, 625 (60.6 percent) of which were anti-Jewish. Anti-Islamic

Anti-Islamic incidents were also outnumbered by those


targeting blacks (1,856), whites (653), gay men (750), lesbians (160), LGBTs in
general (277), Hispanics (331), and people of other ethnicities (324). Anti-Asian
incidents (135) equaled anti-Islamic ones. Based on a 2013 estimate of 2.95 million Muslims derived
ones constituted just 13.1 percent.

from Pews 2011 figure and typical growth of 100,000 per year, there were 4.6 anti-Islamic incidents per 100,000
Muslims in 2013, the same as 2012s rate and lower than the average of 6.0 per 100,000 for 200211. The 2013
rate for Muslims was less than half that for Jews (9.6 per 100,000 for a population of roughly 6.5 million) and
homosexuals/bisexuals (11.0 per 100,000, assuming that they comprise 3.5 percent of the U.S. population). The
rate for blacks was similar to that of Muslims (4.5 per 100,000 for a population of 41.6 million).

Anti-Islamic

hate crimes were no more violent than others in 2013. Of the 6,933 ofenses spanning all hate
crimes, 734 (10.6 percent) were aggravated assaults and 1,720 (24.8 percent) were simple assaults. The 165 antiIslamic ofenses mirrored this breakdown: 17 (10.3 percent) were aggravated assaults and 41 (24.8 percent) were
simple assaults. Further, none of the five deaths in 2013 resulted from anti-Islamic hate crimes.

Racist drone strikes are the root cause of terrorist attacks


Gerges 13 (Fawaz Gerges, June 21, 2013, CNN, Why drone strikes are real
enemy in 'war on terror', http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/21/opinion/terrorism-gerges/,
AZ)
Obama's drone calculus ignores the CIA's warning about the continuing "possibilities
of blowback." Officials in Washington ignore the high-cost ways in which the U.S.
"war on terror" and the use of tactics such as drone strikes fuel the fires of homegrown radicalization in Western societies. This is a rising phenomenon that has not
been seriously debated, despite a string of high-profile attacks. While trials have yet
to take place, the Woolwich attack in London and the Boston Marathon bombings
are suspected to be the latest cases in point. In case after case over the past few
years, attackers and would-be attackers have cited the war on terror, first in Iraq
and now in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere as proof that
the West is at war with Islam. The presence of Western boots in Muslim lands
and the continuing use of drone strikes have triggered a backlash among scores of
deluded young Muslims who live in America and Europe, and who come from
diferent educational and class background, including high achievers. What is
surprising is that these attackers are not unified by a core set of ideological beliefs,
or a belonging to a particular terrorist group, but by a core set of grievances,
real or imagined.

Us foreign policy causes terrorism, is what allows fbi domestic


islamophobia to exist in first place
Hennelly 15 (Bob Hennelly, February 26th, 2015, THE ISIS TRUTH WE HIDE
FROM, http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/02/26/americas-awful-truth-thats-hard-hear/,
AZ)
After several decades of self-proclaimed nation building and exporting
democracy in the Middle East and its environs, the results are all too clear. There are
shattered nations in Iraq and Afghanistan, failed states in Yemen, Libya and Syria, and more than a dozen African

Department concedes are under constant threat of attack by


well-armed and organized terrorists. Is it possible that what the U.S. has actually
been doing in these hot spots is terrorism building and exporting chaos? Is this
the awful truth the United States cannot bring itself to admit? Massaging History It would seem so, since
nations that the U.S. State

instead of changing course, the U.S. is in the process of doubling down on its mistakes. How else to explain that the
new GOP presidential hopeful, Jeb Bush, nonchalantly told the Chicago Council on Global Afairs that mistakes were
made in Iraq. He then proceeded to lay out his own plan for becoming the new global sherif in town. Heres a jawdropping statement from that speech: There were mistakes made in Iraq, for sure. Using the intelligence capability
that everybody embraced about weapons of mass destruction was notturns out not to be accurate. Watching his
brothers back, Jeb wove out of thin air a phony consensus that everybody signed on for the rationale for the Iraq
war. Thats despite a vote in Congress in which 23 U.S. Senators and 133 House members opposed it. You see, if
everybody was wrong, then nobody was right. It should come as no surprise that Jebs team of policy wise men
includes many Bush II veterans, among them the unrepentant Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz. His Own Man, With
an Old Plan As much as Jeb Bush insists he is his own man, the audience in Chicago could hear echoes of his
brother Georges cowboy-like approach. When Jeb was asked about how he would handle IS, he said he would
develop a global strategy that would tighten the noose so he and the posse could take them out. During
Bushs remarks, he took aim at the Obama administration for being too quick to disengage from the world and Iraq.
He blamed Obama for creating a power vacuum that set the stage for the rise of IS and Iranian influence. Yet an
examination of President Obamas new National Security Strategy, his proposed military budget and his request for

his own War Powers re-authorization all indicate an administration that is prosecuting a global war on terror with
unfettered latitude as to where and whom it targets. Could it be that this global war on terror, whether it be the
Bush 1.0 or Obama 2.0 version, may actually be what is proliferating the very thing it was aimed to eradicate? One
policy expert who dares to look deeper is Graham Fuller, a career CIA agent and analyst who was vice-chairman of
the CIAs National Intelligence Council. Fuller says it was the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that set the stage for IS.
By creating an endemically corrupt central government in Baghdad, notes Fuller, the American occupation provided
a focal point to unite disparate opposition groups. As for the high-profile efort to train a new Iraqi army, that
security force collapsed the moment its U.S. handlers left. (In an odd twist to an already bizarre security metanarrative, Fullers former son-in-law is the uncle of accused Boston Marathon Bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev.) *** In linking Washingtons Middle Eastern policies to the rise of terrorist groups in the region, MIT
professor Noam Chomsky takes it even further back. He says the roots start with the U.S. support of Iraq in its brutal
war with Iran in the 1980s, and include the draconian economic sanctions that followed Saddam Husseins 1990
invasion of Kuwait. In Chomskys view, these sanctions punished Iraqi civilians while reinforcing Saddams
dictatorial control. In his 2006 book Devils Game: How the U.S. Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, longtime
Nation correspondent Robert Dreyfuss documents how the U.S., as early as the 1950s, backed the Muslim
Brotherhood in exchange for help fighting communism. Peaces Deadliest Year One way to justify failed policies is to
pretend that they have worked as advertised. Nowhere was this disconnect between rhetoric and reality more on
display than in President Obamas updating this month of his National Security Strategy. In presenting this new
security game-plan, the president exhibited excessive confidence in declaring that the United States was heading
home and moving beyond ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his mini-version of Bushs infamous Mission
Accomplished statement, he asserted that the threat of catastrophic attacks against the U.S. had diminished.

anything but peace is taking


hold in those places. The sectarian violence has resulted in record numbers of
civilian deaths and injuries. The UN reported last month that more than 12,000
civilians were killed in Iraq in 2014, the deadliest year for noncombatants since 2008. In Afghanistan,
But even as the president describes a winding-down of combat operations,

the UN Assistance Mission counted close to 3,200 civilians killed and more than 6,400 wounded, the deadliest year
since Americas longest war started.

The most Islamophobic fbi policies are in education- the plan is


extra-topical
Or

The root of islamophobia in the fbi is rooted in ignorance- the


aff fails to address the root cause
Weinsten 11 (Adam Weinstein, September 15th, 2011, Mother Jones, That
Islamophobic FBI Training Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg,
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/islamophobic-fbi-training-military, AZ)
Agents at the FBI's Quantico, Virginia, training grounds are taught that all
mainstream American Muslims are terrorist sympathizers in a cult that likes to
donate money to killers. That's according to a scoop by Wired's Spencer Ackerman,
who has exposed a series of amazingly clueless Powerpoint slides and documents
from the federales' training on Islam. If you haven't read his story yet, do so now.
Ackerman's report brings new light to an alarming problem that's been welldocumented since 9/11: American police officers, airport screeners, and soldiers
have no freaking clue how to deal with the distinction between the vast majority of
Muslims and the minisule minority that actively seek to do us harm. My MoJo
colleague Adam Serwer points out that local cops around the country have been
getting training that's even worse that the FBI's. He refers to an excellent March

Washington Monthly story detailing how Islamophobic trainers are collecting


homeland security dollars while spewing complete nonsense. For example: "When
you have a Muslim that wears a headband, regardless of color or insignia, basically
what that is telling you is 'I am willing to be a martyr," one trainer blathers. But it
goes way beyond that. Our Islamophobia-beat reporter, Tim Murphy, has detailed on
this site how Rep. Allen West (R-Fla) is championing a skewed, conspiratorial vision
of Islam to convince Americans that we're under attack. I've written about the
meager cultural training ofered to service members and contractors headed for
Iraq and Afghanistan. The materials would be humorous if they weren't so
disturbing: In them Arab men look suspiciously like Lego figures; they're described
as "illogical or irrational," paranoid, and prone to extremes, "perhaps due to the
harsh, desert environment that Arabs have lived in for thousands of years." And
that's just Iraqi Arabsjust wait 'til you read what they say about those dirty Kurds.
All of which is to say that, 10 years after the US government got really preoccupied
with Muslims of all stripes, from Iraqi Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites to Afghan Pashtuns,
Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and a couple hundred other ethnic and tribal identities (not
to mention Muslim-Americans)our civil servants are still taking a reductive, unfair,
and ultimately dangerous attitude toward them. Which may explain why we let
foreign governments lock them up and torture them, even if they're American
citizens. And perhaps it's why the FBI relies blindly on terrorism informants who
walk the fine between tracking potential terrorists and making them. If we
continue to miseducate the well-intending agents and soldiers who serve
at the tip of the spear, we shouldn't be surprised when that spear misses
its target.

2nc neolib = racism cards


Capitalism is the root cause of racism
McLaren and Torres 99 (Peter Mclaren, professor of education at U of California, and
Rudolfo Torres, Professor of Planning, Policy, and Design, Chicano/Latino Studies, and Political
Science, Racism and Multicultural Education: Rethinking Race and Whiteness in Late
Capitalism, Chapter 2 of Critical Multiculturalism: Rethinking Multicultural and Antiracist
Education, edited by Stephen May, p.49-50, Questia)

According to Alex Callinicos (1993), racial

differences are invented. Racism occurs when the characteristics


which justify discrimination are held to be inherent in the oppressed group. This form of
oppression is peculiar to capitalist societies; it arises in the circumstances surrounding industrial
capitalism and the attempt to acquire a large labour force. Callinicos points out three main
conditions for the existence of racism as outlined by Marx: economic competition between workers;
the appeal of racist ideology to white workers; and efforts of the capitalist class to establish and
maintain racial divisions among workers. Capital's constantly changing demands for different
kinds of labour can only be met through immigration. Callinicos remarks that 'racism offers for workers of the
oppressing race the imaginary compensation for the exploitation they suffer of belonging to the ruling nation' (1993, p. 39).
Callinicos notes the way in which Marx grasped how 'racial' divisions between 'native' and 'immigrant' workers could weaken the
working-class. United States' politicians like Pat Buchanan, Jesse Helms and Pete Wilson, to name but a few, take advantage of this
division which the capitalist class understands and manipulates only too well-using racism effectively to divide the working-class.
At this point you

might be asking yourselves: Doesn't racism pre-date capitalism? Here we agree with
Callinicos that the heterophobia associated with precapitalist societies was not the same as modern racism. Pre-capitalist
slave and feudal societies of classical Greece and Rome did not rely on racism to justify the use
of slaves. The Greeks and Romans did not have theories of white superiority. If they did, that must have
been unsettling news to Septimus Severus, Roman Emperor from Ad 193 to 211, who was, many historians
claim, a black man. Racism emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from a key
development of capitalism-colonial plantations in the New World where slave labour stolen from Africa
was used to produce tobacco, sugar, and cotton for the global consumer market (Callinicos, 1993).
Callinicos cites Eric Williams who remarks: 'Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the
consequence of slavery' (cited in Callinicos, 1993, p. 24). In effect, racism emerged as the ideology of the plantocracy. It
began with the class of sugar-planters and slave merchants that dominated England's Caribbean colonies. Racism developed out of
the 'systemic slavery' of the New World. The

'natural inferiority' of Africans was a way that Whites justified


enslaving them. According to Callinicos: Racism offers white workers the comfort of believing
themselves part of the dominant group; it also provides, in times of crisis, a ready-made scapegoat, in the shape of
the oppressed group. Racism thus gives white workers a particular identity, and one which unites them
with white capitalists. We have here, then, a case of the kind of 'imagined community' discussed by Benedict Anderson in
his influential analysis of nationalism. (1993, p. 38) In short, to abolish racism in any substantive sense, we need
to abolish global capitalism.

Class is the driver of all social and existential conditions. Only emancipation
from the status quo modes of production can enact any form of human
freedom
Ebert and Zavarzadeh 08(Teresa L., English, State University of New York, Albany, Masud,
prolific writer and expert on class ideology, Class in Culture, p.ix-xii)
Class is everywhere and nowhere. It is the most decisive condition of social life: it shapes the
economic and, consequently, the social and cultural resources of people. It determines their birth, healthcare,
clothing, schooling, eating, love, labor, sleep, aging, and death. Yet it remains invisible in the every day and in
practical consciousness because, for the most part, it is dispersed through popular culture,
absorbed in cultural difference, obscured by formal equality before the law or explained
away by philosophical arguments. Class in Culture attempts to trace class in different cultural situations and practices
to make its routes and effects visible. However, the strategies obscuring class are cunning, complex, and subtle, and are at work in
unexpected sites of culture. Consequently, this is not a linear book: it surprises class in the segments, folds, vicinities, points, and
divides of culture. It moves, for example, from Abu Ghraib to the post-deconstructive proclamations of Antonio Negri, from stem
cell research to labor history, from theoretical debates on binaries to diets. It is also written in a variety of registers and lengths: in
the vocabularies of theory, the idioms of description and explanation, as well as in the language of polemics, and in long, short, and
shorter chapters. Regardless of the language, the plane of argument, the length of the text, and the immediate subject of our
critiques, our purpose has been to tease out from these incongruous moments the critical elements of a basic grammar of class-one
that might be useful in reading class in other social sites. Our text on eating, for example, unpacks two diets that, we argue,
reproduce class binaries in the zone of desire. The point here is not only when one eats, one eats class, but also class works in the
most unexpected comers of culture, Eating as a sensuous, even sensual corporeality, is seen as the arena of desire which is
represented in the cultural imaginary as autonomous from social relations. Desire

is thought to be exemplary of the


singularity of the individual and her freedom from material conditions. One desires what
one desires. Desire is the absolute lack: it is the unrepresentable. We argue, however, that one
desires what one can desire; one's desire is always and ultimately determined before one
desires it, and it is determined by one's material (class) conditions.

Our point is not that

individuality and singularity are myths but that they are myths in class societies. Individuality and
singularity become reality-not stories that culture tells to divert people from their anonymity in a culture of commoditiesonly when one is free from necessity beyond which "begins that development of human
energy which is an end in itself' (Marx, Capita/III, 958-59). Class is the negation of human freedom.
A theory of class (such as the one we articulate) argues that class is the material logic of social life and
therefore it determines how people live and think . But this is too austere for many contemporary critics.
("Determinism" is a dirty totalizing word in contemporary social critique.) Most writers who still use the concept of class prefer to
talk about it in the more subtle and shaded languages

of overdetermination, lifestyle, taste, prestige, and


preferences, or in the stratification terms of income, occupation, and even status. These are all significant aspects
of social life, but they are effects of class and not class . This brings us to the "simple" question: What is class? We
skip the usual review of theories of class because they never lead to an answer to this question. The genre of review requires, in the
name of fairness, "on the one hand, on the other hand" arguments that balance each perspective with its opposite. The purpose of
Class in Culture is not review but critique not a pluralism that covers up an uncommitted wandering in texts but an argument in
relation to which the reader can take a position leading to change and not simply be more informed. This is not a book of
information; it is a book of critique. To answer the question (what is class?), we argue-and here lies the austerity of our theory-

class is essentially a relation of property, of owning. Class, in short, is a relation to labor because
property is the congealed alienated labor of the other. By owning we obviously do not mean owning just
anything. Owning a home or a car or fine clothes does not by itself put a person in one or another class. What does, is owning
the labor power of others in exchange for wages. Unlike a home or a car, labor (or to be more precise "labor
power") is a commodity that produces value when it is consumed. Structures like homes or machines like
cars or products such as clothes do not produce value. Labor does. Under capitalism, the producers of value do
not own what they produce. The capitalist who has purchased the labor power of the direct producers owns what they
produce. Class is this relation of labor-owning. This means wages are symptoms of estranged labor, of the unfreedom of humans,
namely the exploitation of humans by humans-which is another way to begin explaining class. To

know class, one has to

learn about the labor relations that construct class differences , that enable the subjugation of the many by
the few. Under capitalism labor is unfree, it is forced wage-labor that produces "surplus value"-an objectification of a
person's labor as commodities that are appropriated by the capitalist for profit. The labor of the worker, therefore,
becomes "an object" that "exits outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and it
becomes a power on its own confronting him" which, among other things, "means that the life
which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien " (Marx,
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,272). The direct producers' own labor, in other words, negates their freedom because
it is used, in part, to produce commodities not for need but for exchange. One, therefore, is

made "to exist, first, as a

worker; and, second as a physical subject. The height of this servitude is that it is only as a worker that he can
maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker" (273). Under wage labor,

workers, consequently, relate to their own activities as "an alien activity not belonging to [ them]"
(275). The estranged relation of people to the object of their labor is not a local matter but includes all
spheres of social life. ln other words, it is "at the same time the relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of
nature, as an alien world inimically opposed to [them]" (275). The scope of estrangement in a class society , of
human unfreedom caused by wage labor, is not limited to the alienation of the worker from her products. It includes the productive
activity itself because what is produced is a "summary of the activity, of production," and therefore it is "manifested not only in the
result but in the act of production, within the producing activity itself' (274). The

worker, in the act of production,


alienates herself from herself because production activity is "active alienation, the alienation
of activity, the activity of alienation" (274)-an activity which does not belong to her. This is another way of saying that
the activity of labor-life activity-is turned against the worker and "here we have self-estrangement" (275). In his theory of alienated
labor, Marx distinguishes between the "natural life" of eating, drinking, and procreating which humans share with other animals
and the "species life" which separates humans from animal. This distinction has significant implications for an emancipatory theory
of classless society. "Species life" is the life marked by consciousness, developed senses, and a human understanding himself in
history as a historical being because "his own life is an object for him" (276}--humans, as "species beings," are self-reflexive. To be
more clear, "conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity" (276). The object of man's labor is the
actualization, the "objectification of man's species-life" (277). Alienated labor, however, "in tearing away from man the object of his
production, therefore, ... tears from him his species-life" (277). Consequently, "it changes for him the life of the species into a means
of individual life ... it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of life of the species, likewise in the abstract and
estranged form" (276). This is another way of saying that the

larger questions that enable humans to build


their world consciously are marginalized, and sheer biological living ("individual life in the abstract")
becomes the goal of life in class society structured by wage labor. "Life itself appears only as
a means to life" (276). Class turns "species life" into "natural life." Since society is an extension of the
sensuous activities of humans in nature (labor), the alienation of humans from the products of their labor,
from the very process of labor, which is their life activity, and from their species-being, leads

to the estrangement of humans from humans (277)-the alienation in class societies that is
experienced on the individual level as loneliness. In confronting oneself, one confronts others; which is another
way of saying that one's alienation from the product of one's labor, from productive activity, and from "species
life" is at the same time alienation from other people, their labor, and the objects of their labor . In
class societies, work, therefore, becomes the negation of the worker: he "only feels himself outside his work, and in
his work feels outside himself" (274). Ending class structures is a re-obtaining of human freedom. Freedom
here is not simply the freedom of individuals as symbolized, for instance, in bourgeois "freedom of speech" but is a world-historical

"freedom from necessity" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme). Class struggle is the struggle for
human emancipation by putting an end to alienated labor (as class relations). Alienated labor is the
bondage of humans to production: it is an effect of wage labor (which turns labor into a means of living) and private property
(which is congealed labor).

Emancipation from alienated labor is, therefore, the emancipation of

humans from this bondage because "all relations of servitude," such as class relations, "are
but modifications and consequences" of the relation of labor to production

(Marx, Economic and

Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,280). Class, in short, is

the effect of property relations that are themselves


manifestations of the alienation of labor as wage labor. Wage labor alienates one from one's
own product, from oneself, from other humans, and, as Marx put it, "estranges the species
from man" (276).

Identity-based struggles can never come to grips with the Real of Capital
because todays global capitalism relentlessly fragments identities to ensure
that capitals homogenizing force will prevail.
Slavoj iek, Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana University, 2k, The
Fragile Absolute, p. 11-15

So where are we, today, with regard to ghosts? The first paradox that strikes us, of course, is that this very process

of
global reflexivization that mercilessly derides and chases the ghosts of the past generates not only
its own immediacy but also its own ghosts, its own spectrality. The most famous ghost, which has been
roaming around for the last 150 years, was not a ghost of the past, but the spectre of the (revolutionary) future
the spectre, of course, from the first sentence of The Communist Manifesto. The automatic reaction to The
Manifesto of todays enlightened liberal reader is: isnt the text simply wrong on so many empirical accounts with regard
to its picture of the social situation, as well as the revolutionary perspective it sustains and propagates? Was there ever a
political manifesto that was more clearly falsified by subsequent historical reality? Is not The Manifesto, at its best, the
exaggerated extrapolation of certain tendencies discernible in the nineteenth century? So let us approach The Manifesto
from the opposite end: where

do we live today, in our global post . . . (postmodern, post-industrial)


society? The slogan that is imposing itself more and more is globalization: the brutal imposition of the unified world
market that threatens all local ethnic traditions, including the very form of the nation-state . And in view
of this situation, is not the description of the social impact of the bourgeoisie in The Manifesto more
relevant than ever? The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the
instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole

relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first
condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of
all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed,
fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last
compelled to face with sober senses his real condition in life, and his relations with his kind. The

need of a constantly
expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle
everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world
market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of
Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established
national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose
introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw
material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but
in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants,
requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and
self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in
intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness
and narrowmindedness becomes more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there
arises a world literature.6 Is this not, more than ever, our reality today? Ericsson

phones are no longer Swedish,

Toyota cars are manufactured 60 per cent in the USA, Hollywood culture pervades the remotest parts of the
globe. . . . Furthermore, does not the same go also for all forms of ethnic and sexual identities? Should we
not supplement Marxs description in this sense, adding also that sexual onesidedness and narrowmindedness become
more and more impossible; that concerning sexual practices also, all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,
so that capitalism

tends to replace standard normative heterosexuality with a proliferation of


unstable shifting identities and/or orientations? From time to time Marx himself underestimates this ability of
the capitalist universe to incorporate the transgressive urge that seemed to threaten it; in his analysis of the ongoing
American Civil War, for example, he claimed that since the English textile industry, the backbone of the industrial system,
could not survive without the supply of cheap cotton from the American South rendered possible only by slave labour,
England would be forced to intervene directly to prevent the abolition of slavery. So yes, this global dynamism described by
Marx, which causes all things solid to melt into air, is our reality on condition that we do not forget to supplement this
image from The Manifesto with its inherent dialectical opposite, the spiritualization of the very material process of
production. While

capitalism does suspend the power of the old ghosts of tradition, it generates its
own monstrous ghosts. That is to say: on the one hand, capitalism entails the radical secularization of
social life it mercilessly tears apart any aura of authentic nobility, sacredness, honour, and so on:
It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in
the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless
indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation,

the
fundamental lesson of the critique of political economy elaborated by the mature Marx in the years after The
Manifesto is that this reduction of all heavenly chimeras to brutal economic reality generates a
spectrality of its own. When Marx describes the mad selfenhancing circulation of Capital, whose solipsistic path of
self-fecundation reaches its apogee in todays meta-reflexive speculations on futures, it is far too simplistic to claim
that the spectre of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path regardless of any human or
environmental concern is an ideological abstraction, and that one should never forget that behind this abstraction
veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.7 However,

there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources Capitals circulation is based, and on
which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. The

problem is that this abstraction does not exist only in our


of social reality; it is real in the precise sense of determining the
very structure of material social processes: the fate of whole strata of populations, and sometimes
of whole countries, can be decided by the solipsistic speculative dance of Capital, which pursues its goal
(financial speculators) misperception

of profitability with a blessed indifference to the way its movement will affect social reality. That is
the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, which is much more uncanny than direct
precapitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their
evil intentions; it is purely objective, systemic, anonymous.

Socioeconomic inequalities are assumed to be natural because of their


inherent place in the capitalist systemconstancy makes them invisible to
statistical analysis
Richard York

and Brett Clark, 2010, Professor of Environmental Sociology and Statistics at the University of Oregon, Assistant

Professor of Sociology and Sustainability, 2010, Nothing New Under the Sun? The Old False Promise of New Technology, Review
(Fernand Braudel Center), VOL 33, pp. 203-224, online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23346882

The concept of historicity within the Marxist tradition empha sizes that social "laws," unlike natural laws, vary across different
historical periods. However, during any specific historical context on the second tier of time, such as the respective extended
periods of feudalism or capitalism in Europe, particular

social structures (e.g., economic systems) emerge that exert


a strong influence on the overall organization of society and the everyday happenings in people's
lives. Given the persistence of these social structures over long stretches of time, they serve as
background conditions that generate a form of "social gravity" that interacts with and influ ences all
social relations (York & Clark, 2006; 2007). The pervasive and constant power of this social gravity often
goes unnoticed or is simply assumed to be immutable. For example, the structure of the capitalist
economy generates social inequalities, which are then as sumed to be a natural and inevitable
part of the human condition, when they are in fact simply the product of a particular economic system. Given how
constant the influence is at most points in time, it may be invisible to typical statistical analyses, since statistical
analyses focus on explaining variation, not constancy. These back ground conditions can have dramatic, if
often unrecognized, ef fects on social processes. Nonetheless, unlike many of the forces on the third tier, these particular
forces of the second tier are typi cally social in origin and can be altered through changes in social structure.

A thorough analysis of capitalism in relation to its concealed structural


violence and environmental issues is keysolutions formed without specific
recognition of root cause fail
Richard York

and Brett Clark, 2010, Professor of Environmental Sociology and Statistics at the University of Oregon, Assistant

Professor of Sociology and Sustainability, 2010, Nothing New Under the Sun? The Old False Promise of New Technology, Review
(Fernand Braudel Center), VOL 33, pp. 203-224, online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23346882

While these structural arrangements produce various con tradictions, given the social inequalities and ecological degrada tion
that the system inevitably creates, it also provides a degree of structural stability when measured on a limited timescale, such as
decades or centuries. Thus, the "laws" of capitalism, due to their relative constancy over the past centuries, can appear to be laws
of nature that cannot be transcended. But, as historicity suggests, what appears to be a universal law in a particular context may be

thorough analysis must account for background conditions


that act as social gravity, that are creating specific problems. These background conditions may also
restrict the range of debate, assumptions about the social world, and the potential suggestions
for change. Too often, pro posed solutions, whose focus is on the particularities of the first tier of time, fail to
assess how background conditions contribute to particular problems, such as the current crises
over food, energy, and the environment. As a result, a series of so-called solutions are generated
throughout time, without actually addressing the roots of the problem. Once this is understood, it is

shown to be invalid in other contexts. Thus, a

possible to compre hend how contemporary environmental problems are similar to those in previous decades and centuries. At
the same time, given the persistence of the social gravity stemming from the structure of the world-system, contemporary

environmental problems are more pressing than they have been in the past due to their extra
ordinary scale, and threaten to transgress the planetary boundar ies that maintain the earth system in a state that supports human

civilization. All of this

stresses the importance of properly assess ing the forces driving ecological

problems, as well as the proposed solutions.

2nc circumvention cards

Fusion centers, No Regulations


Fusion centers do what they want, the FBI
German and Stanley 7, German is on the Policy Counsel for National
Security, ACLU Washington Legislative Office; Stanley is the Public Education
Director, ACLU Technology and Liberty Program (December 2007, Michael German
and Jay Stanley, American Civil Liberties Union, WHATS WRONG WITH FUSION
CENTERS?, https://www.aclu.org/files/pdfs/privacy/fusioncenter_20071212.pdf)
Ambiguous Lines of Authority. The participation of agencies from multiple
jurisdictions in fusion centers allows the authorities to manipulate
differences in federal, state and local laws to maximize information
collection while evading accountability and oversight through the practice
of policy shopping.
Private Sector Participation . Fusion centers are incorporating private-sector
corporations into the intelligence process, breaking down the arms length
relationship that protects the privacy of innocent Americans who are employees or
customers of these companies, and increasing the risk of a data breach.
Military Participation . Fusion centers are involving military personnel in law
enforcement activities in troubling ways.
Data Fusion = Data Mining . Federal fusion center guidelines encourage whole sale
data collection and manipulation processes that threaten privacy.
Excessive Secrecy . Fusion centers are hobbled by excessive secrecy, which
limits public oversight, impairs their ability to acquire essential information and
impedes their ability to fulfill their stated mission, bringing their ultimate value into
doubt.

Fusion centers guarantee profiling will continue post-plan


Constitution Project 12 The Constitution Project (8/15/12, The Constitution
Project, RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUSION CENTERS,
http://www.constitutionproject.org/pdf/fusioncenterreport.pdf)
2. Reports of Political, Racial and Religious Profiling
Despite these constitutional principles, there have been numerous anecdotal
reports of incidents in which fusion centers have targeted individuals in the United
States for surveillance and investigation based solely on beliefs and characteristics
that are protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Although federal
guidance to fusion centers cautions against profiling, these incidents demonstrate
that significant additional guidance, training and oversight are crucial to ensure that
fusion centers and other law enforcement agencies do not engage in racial, religious
and political profiling.41
Recent reports from across the country bear testament to the potential for
problematic profiling at fusion centers, particularly regarding bulletins
and intelligence reports circulated by fusion centers. These are a few
examples:
The February 2009 Prevention Awareness Bulletin, circulated by a Texas
fusion center, described Muslim lobbying groups as providing an
environment for terrorist organizations to flourish and warned that the
threats to Texas are significant.

The bulletin called on law enforcement officers to report activities such as Muslim
hip hop fashion boutiques, hip hop bands, use of online social networks, video
sharing networks, chat forums and blogs.42
A Missouri-based fusion center issued a February 2009 report describing support
for the presidential campaigns of Ron Paul or third party candidates, possession of
the iconic Dont Tread on Me flag and anti-abortion activism as signs of
membership in domestic terrorist groups.43
The Tennessee Fusion Center listed a letter from the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) to public schools on its online map of Terrorism
Events and Other Suspicious Activity. The letter had advised schools that
holiday celebrations focused exclusively on Christmas were an
unconstitutional government endorsement of religion.44
The Virginia Fusion Centers 2009 Terrorism Risk Assessment Report
described student groups at Virginias historically black colleges as
potential breeding grounds for terrorism and characterized the diversity
surrounding a military base as a possible threat.45

Fusion centers arent under federal jurisdictionlocalities


wont enforce rules
Price 13, Michael Price serves as counsel for the Brennan Centers Liberty and
National Security Program (12/10/13, Michael Price, Brennan Center for Justice,
National Security and Local Police,
https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/national-security-local-police)
The Brennan Center has identified three major reasons the system is inefective:
Information sharing among agencies is governed by inconsistent rules and
procedures that encourage gathering useless or inaccurate information. This poorly
organized system wastes resources and also risks masking crucial intelligence.
As an increasing number of agencies collect and share personal data on federal
networks, inaccurate or useless information travels more widely. Independent
oversight of fusion centers is virtually non-existent, compounding these risks.
Oversight has not kept pace, increasing the likelihood that intelligence
operations violate civil liberties and harm critical police-community
relations.
According to a report by the Government Accountability Office, 95 percent of
suspicious activity reports are not even investigated by FBI. This is unsurprising. In
the past, police departments shared information only when there was reasonable
suspicion of criminal activity. This time-tested standard ensured that police were
focused on real threats and not acting on their own biases or preconceptions. But
with this crucial filter removed after the attacks of 9/11, almost any behavior
from photographing a landmark, to stretching in the park, to attending a mosque
can be viewed as potentially suspicious, reported, and shared with thousands of
other government agencies. It is impractical to sift through and follow up on every
report, so important information can easily fall through the cracks. In some
instances, the practice has also undermined community trust in the police, which is
an essential element of domestic counterterrorism.
Efforts by the federal government to address this oversight gap have been
half-hearted. The system is not under federal government control. Federal
funds simply flow to state legislatures, which then allocate them as they
see fit no questions asked. State and local governments have rarely

stepped into the breach, allowing intelligence activities to go unchecked


and unsupervised .

Fusion centers monitor lawful religious activity


Patel and Price 12 Faiza Patel serves as co-director of the Brennan Centers

Liberty and National Security Program; Michael Price serves as counsel for the
Brennan Centers Liberty and National Security Program (10/18/12, Faiza Patel,
Michael Price, Brennan Center for Justice, Fusion Centers Need More Rules,
Oversight, https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/fusion-centers-need-more-rulesoversight)
Instead of looking for terrorist threats, fusion centers were monitoring lawful
political and religious activity. That year, the Virginia Fusion Center
described a Muslim get-outthe-vote campaign as subversive. In 2009,
the North Central Texas Fusion Center identified lobbying by Muslim
groups as a possible threat.
The DHS dismissed these as isolated episodes, but the two-year Senate
investigation found that such tactics were hardly rare. It concluded that fusion
centers routinely produce irrelevant, useless or inappropriate
intelligence that endangers civil liberties.
None of their information has disrupted a single terrorist plot. These revelations call
into question the value of fusion centers as currently structured. At a minimum,
they underscore the need for greater oversight and clearer rules on what
information fusion centers collect and disseminate.
Of course, efective information sharing is critical to national security. But as the
Senate investigation demonstrates, there is little value in distributing information if
it is shoddy, biased or simply irrelevant. When fusion centers feed such information
into the echo chamber of federal databases, they only compound mistakes and clog
the system.
The DHS has failed to create efective mechanisms or incentives for quality control.
Instead, fusion centers collect and share information according to their
individual standards, which vary considerably.
These rules often permit information to flow to federal agencies that has
no connection to criminal activity let alone terrorism. This creates the risk
that intelligence networks will become saturated with poor or irrelevant information
as well as lend undue credibility to inaccurate data. The Senate report showed that
these risks are not just theoretical.
Fusion centers need explicit and consistent rules. The DHS should ensure that
the information the centers collect and distribute is relevant, useful and
constitutional by requiring them to show some reasonable suspicion that criminal
activity is afoot.
This is not a particularly high bar to clear. The reasonable suspicion standard is
familiar to every police officer. The requirement would serve as an important
bulwark against privacy and civil rights violations, but it would also keep
meaningless information out of the system.
Without such well-defined and familiar standards, as the Senate report
demonstrates, fusion centers are left rudderless.

In addition, fusion centers must have active, independent oversight. While


Congressional inquiries are important for exposing problems, the Senate should not
have been the first governmental body to take a critical look at fusion centers.
At the state and local level, there is often no mechanism to ensure that fusion
centers are generating useful information or complying with the law. At the
federal level, the DHS is responsible for verifying that the data shared by fusion
centers meet certain minimum standards. But the DHS has delegated this
responsibility to the centers themselves and has not conducted
independent audits.
DHS oversight has been so poor that the department could not even say
how much money it has spent on fusion centers, estimating the cost at
somewhere from $289 million to $1.4 billion.

Their inherently local nature makes regulation impossible- the


plan does nothing
ONeil 8 political science graduate student at the University of California Los
Angeles (UCLA) Previously, iobhan served as the analyst for domestic security and
intelligence at the Congressional Research Service (CRS). She spent five years
working in homeland security serving as the deputy chief of the Intelligence Bureau
of the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness (OHSP) (April 2008,
Siobhan, Homeland Security Afairs, The Relationship between the Private Sector
and Fusion Centers: Potential Causes for Concern and Realities,
https://www.hsaj.org/articles/134)
Given that fusion centers are entities established by states and localities to
serve their own law enforcement, emergency response, and homeland security
needs, and compounded by the sensitivities associated with federalism, the
federal government is in a difficult position of balancing its interests and
respecting the local nature of fusion centers. As such, the federal
government has been understandably hesitant to place requirements on
fusion centers. Instead, federal agencies have produced guidelines, which
have not been compulsory, to include the National Strategy for Information
Sharing and Fusion Center Guidelines. 8 While these documents address some of
the tactical and operational concerns related to fusion centers, they are often
vague to a fault and fail to provide the comprehensive vision for fusion
centers as part of the nations homeland security posture.
Failure to create a consensus on the role, structural requirements, and
responsibilities for fusion centers is apt to increase the potential for
ineffectiveness, which threatens the viability of fusion centers. If fusion centers
fail to demonstrate their worth and strengthen and augment our nations homeland
security eforts, political support and external agency engagement with these
centers is likely to decline. Moreover, potential civil liberties abuses could damage
fusion centers credibility and undermine their public support. It has rightfully been
warned that even rumors of impropriety and civil liberties abuses associated with a
single fusion center can cause irreparable damage to the reputation of all fusion
centers nationwide. This would be unfortunate given the potential for fusion centers
to provide public safety and homeland security benefits to both local communities
and the nation.

Local surveillance cirvumetns


General Local surveillance can break the law without
consequence they can they can cover it up with non
disclosure agreements
Fenton 15 (Justin Fenton, who joined The Sun in 2005, has covered the Baltimore Police
Department since 2008. His work includes an investigation into Cal Ripken Jr.'s minor league baseball
stadium deal with his hometown of Aberdeen and a three-part series chronicling a ruthless con woman,
Baltimore Police used secret technology to track cellphones in thousands of cases, April 9, 2015,
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-stingray-case-20150408story.html#page=1 -JD)

The Baltimore Police Department has used an invasive and controversial cellphone
tracking device thousands of times in recent years while following instructions from
the FBI to withhold information about it from prosecutors and judges, a detective
revealed in court testimony Wednesday. The testimony shows for the first time how
frequently city police are using a cell site simulator, more commonly known as a
"stingray," a technology that authorities have gone to great lengths to avoid
disclosing. The device mimics a cellphone tower to force phones within its range to
connect. Police use it to track down stolen phones or find people. Until recently, the
technology was largely unknown to the public. Privacy advocates nationwide have
raised questions whether there has been proper oversight of its use. Baltimore has
emerged in recent months as a battleground for the debate. In one case last fall, a
city detective said a nondisclosure agreement with federal authorities prevented
him from answering questions about the device. The judge threatened to hold him
in contempt if he didn't provide information, and prosecutors withdrew the
evidence. The nondisclosure agreement, presented for the first time in court
Wednesday, explicitly instructs prosecutors to drop cases if pressed on the
technology, and tells them to contact the FBI if legislators or judges are asking
questions. Detective Emmanuel Cabreja, a member of the Police Department's
Advanced Technical Team, testified that police own a Hailstorm cell site simulator
the latest version of the stingray and have used the technology 4,300 times since
2007. Cabreja said he had used it 600 to 800 times in less than two years as a
member of the unit. Nate Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties
Union, said 4,300 uses is "huge number." He noted that most agencies have not
released data. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement says its officers have
used the device about 1,800 times. Police in Tallahassee say they have used it more
than 250 times; police in Tacoma, Wash., 170 times. Former U.S. Judge Brian L.
Owsley, a law professor at Indiana Tech, said he was "blown away" by the Baltimore
figure and the terms of the nondisclosure agreement. "That's a significant amount
of control," he said. Agencies have invoked the nondisclosure agreement to keep
information secret. At a hearing last year, a Maryland State Police commander told
state lawmakers that "Homeland Security" prevented him from discussing the
technology. Wessler said the secrecy is upending the system of checks and
balances built into the criminal justice system. "In Baltimore, they've been using
this since 2007, and it's only been in the last several months that defense attorneys

have learned enough to start asking questions," he said. "Our entire judicial system
and constitution is set up to avoid a 'just trust us' system where the use of invasive
surveillance gear is secret."

Cant stop government data collection on companies


subpoena power can bypass the fourth amendment and violate
the rights of Americans
KRAVETS 15 (David Kravets is a WIRED senior staf writer and founder of the fake news
site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been a reporter since the
manual typewriter days, We Dont Need No Stinking Warrant: The Disturbing, Unchecked
Rise of the Administrative Subpoena, 08.28.12,
http://www.wired.com/2012/08/administrative-subpoenas/ - JD)

But by law, utilities must hand over customer records which include any billing
and payment information, phone numbers and power consumption data to the
DEA without court warrants if drug agents believe the data is relevant to an
investigation. So the utility eventually complied, after losing a legal fight earlier this
month. Meet the administrative subpoena (.pdf): With a federal officials signature, banks, hospitals,
bookstores, telecommunications companies and even utilities and internet service providers virtually all
businesses are required to hand over sensitive data on individuals or corporations,
as long as a government agent declares the information is relevant to an
investigation. Via a wide range of laws, Congress has authorized the government to bypass
the Fourth Amendment the constitutional guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that
requires a probable-cause warrant signed by a judge. In fact, there are roughly 335 federal statutes on the books
(.pdf) passed by Congress giving dozens upon dozens of federal agencies the power of the administrative
subpoena, according to interviews and government reports. (.pdf) I think this is out of control. What has happened
is, unfortunately, these statutes have been on the books for many, many years and the courts have acquiesced,

federal officials from a broad


spectrum of government agencies issue them hundreds of thousands of times
annually. But none of the agencies are required to disclose fully how often they
utilize them meaning there is little, if any, oversight of this tactic thats
increasingly used in the war on drugs, the war on terror and, seemingly, the war
on Americans constitutional rights to be free from unreasonable government
trespass into their lives. Thats despite proof that FBI agents given such powers under the
Patriot Act quickly began to abuse them and illegally collected Americans
communications records, including those of reporters . Two scathing reports from the
Justice Departments Inspector General uncovered routine and pervasive illegal use
of administrative subpoenas by FBI anti-terrorism agents given nearly carte blanche
authority to demand records about Americans communications with no
supervision. When the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, perhaps the nations most liberal appeals court based
said Joe Evans, the utilitys attorney. Anecdotal evidence suggests that

in San Francisco, ordered Golden Valley to fork over the data earlier this month, the court said the case was easily
decided because the records were relevant to a government drug investigation. With the data the Alaska utility

DEA may then use further administrative subpoenas to acquire the


suspected indoor-dope growers phone records, stored e-mails, and perhaps creditcard purchasing histories all to build a case to acquire a probable-cause warrant to
handed over, the

physically search their homes and businesses. But the administrative subpoena
doesnt just apply to utility records and drug cases. Congress has spread the
authority across a huge swath of the U.S. government , for investigating everything from
hazardous waste disposal, the environment, atomic energy, child exploitation, food stamp fraud, medical insurance
fraud, terrorism, securities violations, satellites, seals, student loans, and for breaches of dozens of laws pertaining
to fruits, vegetables, livestock and crops. Not one of the government agencies with some of the broadest
administrative subpoena powers Wired contacted, including the departments of Commerce, Energy, Agriculture, the
Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI, would voluntarily hand over data detailing how often they issued
administrative subpoenas. The Drug Enforcement Administration obtained the power under the Comprehensive
Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 and is believed to be among the biggest issuers of administrative
subpoenas. Its a tool in the toolbox we have to build a drug investigation. Obviously, a much, much lower
threshold than a search warrant, said Lawrence Payne, a DEA spokesman, referring to the administrative subpoena
generically. Payne declined to discuss individual cases. Payne said in a telephone interview that no database was
kept on the number of administrative subpoenas the DEA issued. But in 2006, Ava Cooper Davis, the DEAs deputy
assistant administrator, told a congressional hearing, The administrative subpoena must have a DEA case file
number, be signed by the investigators supervisor, and be given a sequential number for recording in a log book or
computer database so that a particular field office can track and account for any administrative subpoenas issued
by that office. After being shown Davis statement, Payne then told Wired to send in a Freedom of Information Act
request, as did some of the local DEA offices we contacted, if they got back to us at all. Would suggest a FOIA
request to see whether you can get a number of administrative subpoenas. Our databases have changed over the
years as far as how things are tracked and we dont have access to those in public afairs unfortunately, Payne
said in an e-mail. He said the agency has never been asked how many times it issued administrative
subpoenas. Amy Baggio, a Portland, Oregon federal public defender representing drug defendants for a decade,
said DEA agents use these like a doctors prescription pad on their desk. Sometimes, she said, they issue
hundreds upon hundreds of them for a single prosecution often targeting mobile phone records. They

are

using them exponentially more in all types of federal criminal investigations. Im


seeing them in every drug case now, Baggio said. Nobody is watching what they are
doing. I perceive a complete lack of oversight because there isnt any required.

Nypd alt cause


Local Surveillance like the NYPD is Islamaphobic
Kane 13 (Alex Kane is an assistant editor for the news website Mondoweiss, which covers the

IsraelPalestine conflict, and the World section editor at AlterNet. His work has also appeared in Salon,
The Daily Beasts Open Zion blog, Vice, BBC Persian, +972 magazine, the Electronic Intifada, Extra!,
and Common Dreams, Kane is citing the book Enemies Within by Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman,
Alex Kane on Enemies Within : Inside the NYPDs Secret Spying Unit and bin Ladens Final Plot Against
America, October 24th, 2013, http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/raking-the-coals-islamophobiasurveillance-targeting-and-the-nypds-secret-spying-unit)

Like the NYPD, the FBI has used its own power to pressure Muslims into becoming
informants in exchange for help. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the
FBI has told Muslim-Americans trapped abroad because of their inclusion on a no-fly
list that they could get of easily by spying on their own communities back home
in the US. For all the oversight of the FBI something the NYPD doesnt have to
contend with parts of the federal agency still view Muslims as targets for spying
rather than partners in the fight against terrorism. Far from an aberration in
America's post-9/11 landscape, the NYPD is merely the most extreme example of a
law enforcement apparatus running roughshod over the rights of Muslim
Americans. What's also missing from Apuzzo and Goldmans otherwise excellent
expos of the NYPD is the larger political context in which the spying took
place. The NYPD's logic is Islamophobic at its core: all Muslims are deemed
potential terrorists until they're proven not to be, an inversion of how law
enforcement is supposed to work. Yet there's little exploration of how
Islamophobic discourse from the media and elected officials contribute to the
implementation and acceptance of spying targeting Muslims. In the same year that
Apuzzo and Goldman began reporting on the NYPD's Intelligence Division,
New York Republican Peter King set up House hearings to probe
radicalization among Muslim-Americans a transparent attempt to cast
aspersions on one particular community. In 2010, anti-Muslim blogger Pamela
Geller worked the national media into a frenzy over what was inaccurately labeled
the Ground Zero mosque. King, Geller and other prominent figures who
demonized Muslims directly after 9/11 opened up space for institutions
with even more power, like the police, to move a discourse of bigotry into
policies of bigotry. In an atmosphere where anti-Muslim sentiment largely
went unchallenged, it's no surprise that hardly an eye was batted when
the NYPD hired CIA officials to implement an intelligence collection
program aimed at law-abiding citizens. The book presents an undeniably
damning portrait of the NYPDs surveillance operation. Now, its up to the courts and
lawmakers to decide whether these operations are legal or prudent. Three federal
lawsuits are being pursued in reaction to Apuzzo's and Goldman's groundbreaking
investigations. The next New York City mayor will have to grapple with the question
of continuing or halting the spy operations. Judges and elected officials will have a
documented record on which to look back to decide these weighty questions in the
coming months: Enemies Within.

Surveillance is heavily biased It is assumed that Muslims are


terrorists
Khalek 14 (Rania Khalek is an independent journalist reporting on the underclass and marginalized
communities, How NSA Spying Impacts Muslim Communities and Cultivates Islamophobia, January 26,
2014, http://raniakhalek.com/2014/01/26/how-nsa-spying-impacts-muslim-communities-and-cultivatesislamophobia/ -JD)
RANIA KHALEK: Thats a really good point that you make and I actually want you to touch on that a little bit more

the vilification and demonization of Muslims inside the United


States and foreign has really been used to justify this type of mass
surveillance and in some cases it seems to have worked. All you have to
do is say terrorist, Islamic terrorism and people are like, oh okay . Could you talk
a little bit about that? ABBAS: I agree wholeheartedly that the fear of Islam, the fear of
Muslims, is a notion I think has been cultivated by policy choices at the
federal level. The use of airport screenings, that inevitably cultivates and
reflects the bias that people have against Muslims, has I think created space
for an anti-Muslim movement to take root. Right after September 11, you didnt have your
Act for Americas, your David Yerushalmis, your Center for Security Policys this well-organized,
well-financed movement dedicated towards marginalizing Muslims and
that gave rise to essentially an engine of generating ant-Muslim sentiment
that creates this terrible and despicable cycle where now you have the overt argument
about how

being made that Muslims are here in the United States to abrogate the US constitution, to overthrow the US
government and replace it with Sharia law, which couldnt be further from the truth. As the facts would have it, the
American Muslim community is a well-educated, well-integrated and looking to continue to do so in the world. You
cant identify an American Muslim radical voice in the United States, whereas if you go to Europe, you can find
people that have a platform that say despicable objectionable things. In the US, thats just not the case. But we
still have in the US, which is really exporting anti-Muslim sentiment to other parts of the world especially Europe, we
still have this fear of Islam that absolutely does give rise to justify these surveillance policies. GOSZTOLA: So for
people who are hearing this debate and they maybe think its kind of abstract, weve been hearing people talk
about collection of the information and then weve been hearing about how the information is stored. And right now
when were talking about the program under the Patriot Act, the Section 215 program, which is the bulk records
collection of the phone records, its all about whos going to hold it, whos going to store it, and its kind of like were
not talking about the collection. Id like you to talk about why the collection would be really bad and I think a thing
you could address is how the collection of peoples information in Muslim communities in New York is a huge deal
for them and collecting that information is the beginning of the injustice. ABBAS: Absolutely. What we know a lot
about now regarding the NSAs surveillance programs is what is collected, some of the searching mechanisms that

we really get to see in more


granular detail with the NYPDs specifically designed Muslim surveillance
program is how indiscriminately collected information gets utilized and
what people in positions of authority that can collect such information
think is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars. And what we find is that the NYPD
thought it was absolutely worth taxpayer money to send their agents on
camping trips of 19 and 20-year-old college students. They thought it was
absolutely critical for them to map the Muslim community in Newark, New
Jersey, and beyond, identifying every halal grocery store, every halal
restaurant. These things are laughable when we see them up close and in granular detail and just like the
can be utilized to sift through the collected information. But what

PCLOB board has determined itself, a board that was authorized by Congress years ago, that the sifting through
everybodys information on an ongoing basis actually is not only objectionable in itself but its not productive by
any criteria. So you have for instance James Clapper arguing that theres the piece of mind quotients that is part
of the benefit of their surveillance program because were monitoring everything. At the very least we know that
nothing is happening. But this mentality that gave rise to the NSA program is really the objectionable thing that
needs to end because it gives rise to not only indiscriminate collection of information automatically through these
telecommunications companies, but its also given rise to a network of 15,000 FBI informants that have saturated
the Muslim community across the country, that are sent to mosques without any type of criminal predicate just to
collect information because theres a sense that thats where the problem. And thats the inevitable result of
indiscriminate collection. Its always going to be the case that indiscriminate collectionin addition to not being
productivwill lead to despicable consequences. And Ill end my answer here. The saddest thing Ive ever heard
as a CAIR staf attorney, and I hear lots of sad things, was when

a young guy told me that when

he goes to the mosque to pray, his mom warns him to be careful. And the
mom warns him to be careful because theres an understanding based on
experience that the mosque is likely filled with informants and infiltrators
that are not there to make us any safer but there to extract information
from innocent Americans by any means necessary.

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