From The Boston Review
by Aziz Huq
Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream
Christopher Bail
Princeton University Press, $35 (Cloth)
On January 11, Steven Emerson, the executive director of a not-for-profit called The Investigative Project, broke some bad news on Fox News about the English town of Birmingham. “There are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in,” he explained. As for London, “there are actually Muslim religious police that actually beat and actually wound seriously anyone who doesn’t dress according to Muslim, religious Muslim attire.” Although Emerson apologized via Twitter for his Birmingham remark, he offered no apology for similar allegations made four days earlier on Fox News about “no go zones . . . in Belgium, in Sweden, in the Netherlands, in France . . . in Italy.”
Emerson is not the only one using mass media to stoke public alarm about Muslim communities in America and Europe. In the sociologist Christopher Bail’s catalogue of what he optimistically labels the Anti-Muslim fringe, Emerson, a former congressional staffer and journalist specializing in national security, figures alongside prominent public voices such as Daniel Pipes, founder of the Middle East Forum (MEF), Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), David Yerushalmi, founder of the Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), and Brigitte Gabriel, founder of ACT! for America. Emerson’s insinuations are comparatively subtle. ACT!’s Brigitte Gabriel, by contrast, has announced that Arabs and Muslims “have no soul,” and that any “practicing Muslim who believes in the teaching of the Quran cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America.”
In the first quantitative study of this movement, Christopher Bail finds that Emerson, Gabriel, and other so-called fringe voices now command significant access to national press (not just Fox), substantial financial resources, and large networks of supporters. ACT!, for example, which was founded in 2004, had 100 local chapters by 2007, and by 2013 claimed 303 chapters in forty-five American states as well as twenty-four chapters in other countries. Today, such organizations are hardly fringe.
Bail’s ambition is to explain how SANE, ACT!, MEF, and their peers came to power in American discussions of Islam and terrorism. The central culprit, on his account, is the mass media. Rather than striving for accuracy or balance, Bail argues, media coverage tends to tilt persistently in favor of the most vitriolic, emotional, and agitated voices in the public sphere—a bias anti-Muslim groups have wittingly or unwittingly (Bail doesn’t say) exploited. Bail’s causal account is based on impressive quantitative research and the innovative application of algorithmic text-analysis tools to both mass media and social media such as Facebook and Twitter. But his account is only partly satisfying as an etiology of the anti-Muslim fringe’s rise. Nevertheless, as an indictment of prominent thinking about the role of free speech in a liberal society, it has real bite.
