Among the numerous ideological affinities and governing styles shared by President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a commitment to the rhetoric of “fake news.” In the last year, Netanyahu has increasingly borrowed this Trumpian formulation in an attempt to quell dissent and undercut critical Israeli and international media scrutiny. Netanyahu is not unique in this regard. Over the course of the last year, authoritarian regimes across the globe—including Syria, Russia and Malaysia—have adopted the fake news script to silence detractors and critics, frequently in response to the charge of human rights violations.
Palestinian adherents of what is known as the peace process never quite entertained the illusion that the United States is a neutral arbiter, let alone honest broker in matters Israeli-Palestinian. Rather, they allowed themselves to believe that, precisely on account of its close relationship and therefore influence over Israel, Washington would be an effective mediator and as such serve as the midwife of Palestinian statehood. It was on this basis that Palestinians embraced the framework of exclusive American sponsorship of bilateral Israel-Palestinian negotiations divorced from the existing international consensus, devoid of a clear timeline or agenda, and lacking effective arbitration or meaningful enforcement mechanisms.
Moroccans have been consuming regular coverage of Donald Trump since the US presidential campaign heated up. I was here in Fez in December 2015 when candidate Trump called for the United States to bar entry to Muslims—his notorious “Muslim ban.” News of it spread quickly. Moroccan students asked me pointedly and poignantly what he had against Muslims, and why Islam was a special target of his campaign. But if they were aware of the Islamophobia sweeping America in 2015, they also were familiar with his reality show, Celebrity Apprentice.
Turkey’s Islamist hegemons in the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have been losing their grip on reality for some time. Anti-Western conspiracy theories have multiplied in the country since the attempted coup by Turkish military officers on July 15, 2016. Members of the religious-political Gülen movement, which split from the AKP in 2013, were involved in the power struggle with the AKP government that culminated in the coup attempt. Since the leader of the Gülen movement, Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, is based in Pennsylvania, suspicion has also fallen on the United States. Further confounding the AKP-led government and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are the mixed messages coming out of Washington. Initially, the AKP believed that Trump as president would help their efforts to extradite Gülen. Yet, Turkey’s rulers cannot square their assumption of Trump’s sympathy for them with his decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and his inability (or unwillingness, in Erdoğan’s eyes) to put an end to the politically sensitive US trial of Turkish banker Hakan Atilla.
President Donald J. Trump is known for breaking norms of domestic and foreign policy in his first year in office. In terms of US-Saudi relations, however, his policy has been relatively standard. Although he chose Saudi Arabia as his first international destination as president—breaking the pattern of a new president visiting either Canada or Mexico first—little else in the existing US-Saudi relationship has changed.
Trumpism has discombobulated Iran. Revulsion against President Donald J. Trump’s rhetoric and policies has achieved the rare feat of unifying the disgruntled Iranian public and the fractious ruling elite. This nationalist backlash barely conceals the internal crises facing Iran at every level—social, political, environmental and economic.
I have been conducting research in Iraq—in Basra and the outskirts of Tikrit—for roughly the last six months. Since Donald Trump’s election as US president in November 2016, when someone discovers that I live and work in the US, I am usually asked, “That friend of yours [Trump], what’s wrong with him?” Regardless of a person’s politics and where one falls (or not) on the spectrum of confessional and sectarian identities in Iraq, the general consensus currently seems to be that President Trump is, at the very least, a bit odd as a person and, more importantly, as president.
The Trump administration has thus inherited a basket of policies that were largely focused on narrowly targeted US military intervention against ISIS, and the acceptance of continued violence and instability in Syria even amidst Russian military intervention into the conflict. In the first year of the Trump administration, these policies, for the most part, have been continued and expanded.
Last April, an Egyptian court acquitted Aya Hijazi and seven others of charges related to their work with a charitable foundation for Cairo’s street children. After nearly three years in prison, Hijazi, a dual US-Egyptian citizen, was released and allowed to return to the United States where President Donald J. Trump welcomed her with a visit to the White House. “We are very happy to have Aya back home,” Trump exclaimed while seated next to Hijazi during a photo opportunity in the Oval Office. Even by the standards of an already unorthodox presidency, the scene was a strange one.
Trumpism as experienced from Lebanon is inextricably linked to the effects of the Trump administration’s positions and policies in the broader Middle East. The complexities of Lebanese politics and intrigue, and the social and economic challenges faced by the Lebanese as well as the country’s huge refugee population, however, are of little interest to President Donald Trump and his inner circle. Their de-contextualized fixation on Hizballah reflects US domestic politics and parochial Israeli anxieties rather than broader US geopolitical interests.
Knowledge production about the Middle East, Edward Said argued, has been a geopolitical project of empire. This is why the following dispatches to Trumpland provide a crucial intervention. Collectively, the dispatches ask the following: What does Trumpism mean from...
Moustafa Bayoumi is author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (2009) and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches From the War on Terror (2015). He is professor of English at Brooklyn College. In this interview with MERIP editorial committee member Alex Lubin, Bayoumi reflects on the changing nature of anti-Muslim racism and the so-called war on terror.
Donald J. Trump ran for president on a platform that included a pledge to bring back the torture technique of waterboarding and “a hell of a lot more.” On the campaign trail, Trump told his supporters: “We have to fight so viciously and violently because we’re dealing with violent people…We have to fight fire with fire…or we are not going to have much of a country left.” Clearly, he was operating on the premise that these techniques work, that the kinds of people subjected to waterboarding and other forms of custodial violence in the “war on terror”—namely, Muslims—deserve it, and that the cancellation of the George W. Bush administration’s torture program by Barack Obama in 2009 was a mistake.
Torch-bearing white supremacists and neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, VA in August 2017 shocked many with their chants of “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” Days later, white nationalist Richard Spencer was interviewed on Israeli TV about the role of the so-called “alt-right” in Charlottesville rally that turned deadly. When pressed about their anti-Semitic slogans, he asserted that Jews are overrepresented both on the left and in the “establishment” as “Ivy League-educated people who really determine policy,” while ”white people are being dispossessed from this country.” [1] He excluded Jews from this circle of persecuted “white people.” Indeed, he implied that Jews were the persecutors, dispossessing white people of their country by imposing a multicultural regime that allowed black and brown people to displace whites and deprive them of their national heritage.
Less than a year into Trump’s presidency, the world’s policeman is back, now armed with a Twitter account. Flying largely under the media radar, the US military is flexing its muscles around the world—and in some areas it is going on the offensive. Since Trump took office, the United States has quietly increased the number of troops in the Middle East by 33 percent and there are plans for an “enduring presence” in both Iraq and Syria. More troops and yet another supposedly new strategy are being deployed for the endless war in Afghanistan. US soldiers are fanning out across an archipelago of bases in Africa to conduct what they call “train, advise and assist” missions with nearly 1,000 soldiers in Niger. In Somalia the numbers are also climbing: Troop levels are the highest since the “Black Hawk Down” incident in 1993. An aggressive surge of lethal drone strikes and clandestine missions led by the military’s elite Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and a reinvigorated CIA in far-flung corners of the world outside of America’s declared battlefields marks the widest departure from Trump’s ostensible isolationism. This surge signals, paradoxically perhaps, an embrace of both Obama’s drone warfare presidency and a more naked militarization of US foreign policy.
The arrival of the Donald J. Trump presidency shook the foundations of US domestic politics but also rattled the Middle East. This chaotic administration regularly sends mixed messages and sows confusion as the president’s erratic tweets and off-the-cuff comments...
The AKP, in pushing the expansion of the Diyanet for political purposes, also has enhanced the capacity of the institution to pursue its own agenda. Indeed, the unprecedented expansion of the Diyanet in recent years demonstrates its ability to seize opportunities arising from its common cause with AKP to expand its role in order to pursue, in tandem, the expansion of the religious field and Islamization of public space and morality.
The eruption of fighting by rival factions in Yemen’s southern city of Aden on January 28 provides distressing additional evidence that Yemen’s war is best understood as a series of mini-wars reflecting the intersection of diverse domestic drivers of conflict and Gulf regional fragmentation.
It is wrong to code what is happening in Yemen as a Sunni-Shi‘i conflict. The Houthis are not an Iranian proxy but a predominantly local political movement founded in long-standing, Yemen-centric grievances and power struggles. The cynical use of sectarian language casts the conflict in Yemen as part of an epochal, region-wide struggle rather than a local civil war made more deadly for Yemeni civilians by Saudi and Emirati intervention.
The protests reveal a widespread disaffection with all existing political factions. New slogans calling for the “death” of “the dictator” and for a “referendum” alternated with those in favor of the Pahlavi monarchist regime that ruled Iran before the 1979 revolution. This public enunciation of an all-or-nothing approach to political change in Iran is an unexpected development, and is indicative of a new level of rejectionist “blue” alienation, especially among Iranian youth.
