Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine.

My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.

Donald Trump has said a lot of terrible things about Muslims, and one of his

first acts as president was to partially fulfill his campaign pledge and attempt to ban many of them

from entering the country. Trump, in this way as in so many others, is a monstrous person.

But the notion that his Islamophobia was an abhorition for the White House, or a mainstreaming

of private prejudices long nurtured on the fringe, is a misleading one.

As my guest Khaled Bedouin argues, in an article in the Columbia Law Review, the most brazen private animus towards

Muslims has, since September 11th, been sustained by structural Islamophobia, perpetuated by the state.

The post-9-11 national security state that targeted Muslims here and abroad may have declared

its mission in the decorous language and

legitimate trappings of law enforcement and democracy promotion. But it was that national

security state, says Badun, that nurtured the brazenly racist private Islamophobia that has

exploded to new heights over the past decade, and which Donald Trump wrote into the White

House.

Khaled Bedouin is a professor at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law and senior

affiliated faculty at the University of California Berkeley Islamophobia research and documentation

project.

He is also the author of American Islamophobia, The Roots and Rise of Fear, forthcoming from University of California Press in 2018.

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