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 aberration for the White House,

or a mainstreaming of private prejudices long nurtured

on the fringe is a misleading one.

As my guest Kaleed Bedoon 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-911 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 Badoon, that nurtured the brazenly

racistly racist, private Islamophobia that has exploded to new heights

over the past decade and which Donald Trump wrote into the White House.

Kaled Bedoon 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 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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