Narrative

Recent events targeting Arabs living in the United States has made one thing become clear -- anything and anyone can be sacrificed. For the Arab community in America, that sacrifice was already in full effect during previous administrations. Now in this new administration, the violent “offering” of Arabs and Arab Americans has been elevated to new (and not so new) forms.

The concept of sacrificial violence is often rooted in vengeance or a means to achieve a greater good. The foregoing of the rights individuals and groups of people is institutionalized in its process, structured and maintained with the rule of law. The idea is that in order to achieve a “greater good,” the sacrificed victim is given up for the “benefit of others.” According to French Philosopher Rene Girard in his book Violence and the Sacred, once a society deems sacrifice as acceptable, it becomes “hardly surprising that in some societies whole categories of human beings are systematically reserved for sacrificial purposes in order to protect other categories.”² In terms of America, the sacrificed tend to be anyone who is not a white, cis, straight, able-bodied, male. Those who do not fit those specific categories are othered by those in power. The “othering” of communities follows undefined, loose, constantly changing and never clearly articulated social bonds. Communities that are scapegoated and sacrificed often become objects of rage, hate, and violence.

Arabs in America have been positioned as a sacrificial group for longer than the first few months of 2025. The abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, a legal green cardholder, from his university housing at Colombia University is not a new phenomenon in the Arab community. Community activists and members have long been targeted by the United States government regardless of citizenship. The difference between the current administration and previous administrations is the vast array of people and speed in which they are being rounded up and targeted. In the past, specifically when targeting the Arab community, administrations targeted people in phases in order to keep their intentions from the general public.

For example, the [George W.] Bush administration passed the Patriot Act, then thousands of people were placed on a list; then came the random calls from the FBI to people’s homes, followed by missing people who were picked up, often without charges and held indefinitely. Later came deportations and, in many cases, family and friends were denied information regarding whereabouts of detainees or deportees. December 2002 marked a new phase in the backlash with the beginning of special registration – the most egregious period where thousands of men were locked up even though many had valid visas. ³

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Using the government as a guide, the American public begins to form a collective agreement on which groups are sacrificial and are considered the other. In the case of Arab American, that picture was painted long before the George W. Bush Administration created the Patriot Act in the years post 9/11. The excerpt below shows the transcript from a hearing held before the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice of the Committee on Judiciary, House of Representatives on July 16, 1986 titled “Ethically motivated violence against Arab-Americans."  

In this transcript, the speaker, Hon. Nick Joe Rahall, Representative in Congress from West Virginia, describes how Anti-Arab hate is being fueled directly by the President and members of his administration, leading to violence against Arab Americans. Rep. Rahall says that the hateful speech being promoted by the top legislators has been repeated in newspapers and therefore is being absorbed by the American public. However, to get the public on board, political leaders use the judicial system as a tool to aid in their sacrificial beliefs. A clear example of this can be seen through the Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday April 7, 2025, which allowed the Trump Administration to continue to utilize the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to continue to deport people without due process.

Arab Americans have been continually targeted and sacrificed through political and legal means in order for society to legitimize their hate. Looking at the Bush Administration again, policies enacted against the Arab American community has led to socially acceptable violence against them. For example, in her book Homeland Insecurity: the Arab American and Muslim American Experience After 9/11, Louise Cainkar discusses an attack on the Chicagoland Arab American community the day after 9/11:

The day after the 9/11 attacks, some three hundred young southwest suburban whites gathered at Oak Lawn High School and organized a protest march to the Mosque Foundation of Bridgeview about two miles away, a collective effort allegedly instigated by a talk radio personality. The group drove in parade-like fashion to the area near the Bridgeview mosque, waving American flags and shouting, “Death to Arabs,” then exited their cars to lay siege to the mosque... the siege went on for two days, during which time Arabs and Muslims in the neighborhood lived in absolute fear. ¹

Although this mob was emboldened by the previous day’s attack, collective attitudes towards Arab Americans were shaped long before that day.

Both large scale attacks like the mosque mob and small microaggressions all take a toll on the Arab American community. Societally accepted racial exclusion of Arabs in America has led to a phenomenon among community members called “internment of the psyche.” Nadine Naber uses the term to “name the process by which the state and media’s branding of Arab, South Asian, and/or Muslim masculinities as ‘terrorists’ brings into play dualistic mechanisms of exclusion… or the general sense that one is always being watched and could at any time be attacked, deported, or disappeared.”³ Internally, members of the community are constantly on edge, wondering if they are the next to experience government sanctioned violence. They begin to self-censor as to avoid any detection by their neighbors and the state. The governments directives that both explicitly and inexplicitly declare that certain groups of people, in this case Arabs, are sacrificial, lead to an internment of the psyche.

Looking at the events happening today under the Trump Administration, it is clear that history is continuing to repeat itself. Mahmoud Khalil and other international students are being used as sacrificial symbols by the Trump Administration to show that even if an individual is in America legally, they can and will disappear them at any time. The movement against the genocide in Gaza has exposed an exception in what falls under free speech. Under this new administration, taking a stance against Israel is seen as a justification for state retaliation. This, however, is not an anomaly within American history. Moments such as now remind us of “the Alien Sedation Act of 1790, the repression of abolitionists in the early 19^th century, anti-immigration and anti-labor policies of the late 19^th century, and the era of McCarthyism and COINTELPRO of the 1950’s.”³ Japanese internment camps are also another important comparison that is being used to describe the disappearance of individuals like Mahmoud.

There is an irony of Mahmoud and other disappeared students being held in Louisiana. In 2008, the US government created a plan to place US residents from the MENA region in internment camps that were to be built in Louisiana. The plan never came to fruition due to public backlash at the time, yet in 2025 that very plan is beginning to take shape. Although we can clearly see that history is repeating itself, the question that begs to be asked is “what’s next?”

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References

⁽¹⁾ Cainkar, Louise A. “Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American and Muslim American Experience After 911.” The Russell Sage Foundation, New York. 2009

⁽²⁾ Girard, Rene. “Violence and the Sacred. Bloomsbury Academic.” New York. 1977

⁽³⁾ Naber, Nadine. “The Rule of Forced Engagement: Race, Gender, and the Culture of Fear among Arab Immigrants in San Francisco Post-911.” Cultural Dynamics, London, 2006, 234-266

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