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Social Science and Public Policy

Creating Dangerous Muslims during the ‘War on Terror’

September 27, 2024 at 3:30pm – 5:00pm

Eggers Hall, 341

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Please join the Moynihan Institute’s South Asia Center for a talk by  Mohammad Ebad Athar (Ph.D. candidate, history) and Nausheen Husain (assistant professor, journalism).
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI investigated a 23-year-old Pakistani man, Mohammad Salman Hamdani, who was declared missing at the site of the attack. As part of their investigation, FBI and CIA officials visited Hamdani’s home in Queens where they questioned his parents about his whereabouts and his background. At the conclusion of the investigation, Hamdani was found to be innocent, given full police honors at his funeral, and was declared a hero by mayor Mike Bloomberg. Hamdani is cited in the Patriot Act as someone who “acted heroically.” 
In analyzing the news coverage of Hamdani, Athar and Husain argue that Hamdani’s case is representative of elite news media’s unquestioning acceptance of law enforcement’s framing of South Asian, Arab, and Muslim people as a securitized population throughout the ongoing War on Terror. They connect Hamdani’s story to coverage of more recent cases of entrapment or imperfect entrapment of Muslim men, Yassin Aref and Adel Daoud, by the FBI in sting operations, using data-driven news audits as our methodology. The work of Athar and Husain is supported by the Lender Center for Social Justice.

Mohammad Ebad Athar is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Syracuse University and is a graduate fellow at the Lender Center for Social Justice working on the impact of media coverage of Muslims during the War on Terror. His dissertation research examines the connections in the securitization of South Asian identity in the United States and the Persian Gulf during the ongoing Global War on Terror.

Nausheen Husain is a reporter who investigates aspects of the ongoing War on Terror that have to do with civil rights and incarceration. She is also an assistant professor of journalism and current faculty fellow at the Lender Center for Social Justice at Syracuse University, where her research is focused on agenda-setting news framing techniques of those targeted by War on Terror policies. She has published work in The Nation, The Huffington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and Oakland North.

This event was first published on September 9, 2024 and last updated on September 10, 2024.

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