The University of Michigan is Islamophobic

Disclaimer: While Zionism inherently affects Palestinians and Arabs of all religions, the use of anti-Muslim bigotry is a weapon that doesn’t necessitate a Muslim religious background in order to harm. Islam, especially post Sept. 11, has been racialized and in an orientalist society that fails to recognize the reality that the Middle East is a multi-religious society, Islamophobia is not solely targeted towards the Muslim population, but the Arab and Middle Eastern world more broadly. Accordingly, this piece uses that understanding of Islamophobia as a basis.

As a Muslim Arab growing up in America, I watched the occupation of Iraq pass without Bush behind bars as the Middle East was made a murderous chess match for politicians who did not care that their checkmate cost millions of our lives. In that, my people were made lesser and I always felt that no one genuinely cared about anti-Muslim bigotry, let alone anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism. After all, domestically, our mosques were surveilled, our men detained without due process, our finances questioned as material support for terrorism and our deportation made the basis of a politically viable policy and slogan. To me, it was self-evident — Muslim, Palestinian and Arab lives are made meaningless when it’s politically palatable as per American default.

Despite this reality, when I stepped foot on this campus as an undergrad, I naively believed that its liberal-leaning population would act as a shield where I’d feel safe, far away from the bigotry surrounding the nation. Quickly, I fell in love with Ann Arbor and despite the lack of people who looked like me, I felt that I could voice myself comfortably and did so as a typical over-involved student. Years later, as I have dwelled on campus and seen its ebbs and flows as a double wolverine finishing my law degree this upcoming May, I can earnestly proclaim the University of Michigan is an intrinsically anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab institution. University President Santa Ono, the Board of Regents and the administration have quite frankly turned dormant campus Islamophobia and racism into an institutional weapon against their students and I no longer feel safe — let alone welcome — on a campus that is about to be the academic home of two degrees. 

It’s not just a personal feeling but an overwhelming community concern. After all, the only Arab lounge on campus is facing increased surveillance, security guards are everywhere campus-wide to surveil students to the end of limited protest activity, Ono trashes our protests as “a series of troubling events” while the police remain armed to the teeth in eager anticipation of arresting, pepper spraying, assaulting (even pulling off the hijabs of two protesters) and taunting student protesters advocating against the University’s investment into the state-sponsored murders of tens of thousands of Palestinians. The University has also chosen not to empathize with the plight of Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank– who by every human rights organizations’ account are facing acute humanitarian crises, mass bombings, massacres, and an apartheid regime– in the culmination of the current genocide as Ono practices genocide denial through his purposeful, convoluted use of “the Israel-Hamas war” in his countless emails. Moreover, the University has also emphasized the importance of antisemitism, purposefully painting pro-Palestine protesters as bigoted zealots rather than people caring for the human lives erased by the Zionist regime. Islamophobia, if ever mentioned, is always a throwaway comment and never addresses the authentic roots of it on this campus. For example, student protesters wearing hijabs were attacked online and the University stayed silent. Law School Dean Logue contacted and met with the Jewish Law Student Association to be a resource for them while choosing not to do the same for the Muslim Law Student Association or even the Middle Eastern and North African Law Student Association and their members. Students with Israeli flags, the same flag posted in obliterated Gazan homes, are protected while student protesters with Palestinian flags are surveilled and given trespass warnings, if not prosecuted by the state attorney general with the help of the University. Anti-Palestinian graffiti remains uncondemned while the taking down of pro-Israel posters is labeled as antisemitic by the University. The building of an institute to counter antisemitism is promised while the University ignores the lack of resources for Muslims on campus or an institute to counter Islamophobia, which is especially striking in a state with a dense Muslim population. Less than twelve hours after a vigil mourning Palestinian lives, University staff gleefully powerhosed bereaved students’ chalking commemorating lives lost in a shocking show of disrespect for Palestinian life and death. Statement after statement is released mourning Oct. 7 but each bombing and killing in Gaza and Lebanon are only referred to as “stoking deep division.”  

These flagrant hypocrisies are but a small series of examples of the University’s persistence to treat religious minorities with strikingly different empathy as they purposely deprive their Muslim students of the same humanity. By conflating violence with protest and appealing to outsiders with the racist, Islamophobic implication that Muslims and Arabs are violent, the University has flat-out chosen to ignore a subsect of its community — the University’s Palestinian, Arab and Muslim community. This fact only becomes more insidious when considering that the Ono administration’s disdain towards the University’s own Palestinian, Muslim and Arab population facilitates its funneling of our money towards the Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza. 

Seeing the reality of our tuition dollars at play, protesters, including myself, have filled the streets of campus demanding that the University stop funding the bombing of babies. I don’t mean this as a straw man argument, nor is it an attempt at pathos as this assumes people care about Palestinians, Arabs as well as Muslims and quite frankly, the media and political class do not seem to. Rather, it is the truth of the University’s sworn commitment to maintaining our finances in Israeli investments and the military-industrial complex. Accordingly, what I, and a majority of students, see from the University is the policing and incarceration of student, faculty, and staff dissenters. As their tongues espouse “free speech,” “democracy” and “debate” the University canceled a student election and changed school policies to unilaterally prosecute students to suppress them for meaningfully engaging with the University’s actions of funding the killing of our Palestinian siblings. They have not done this to other marginalized students and comfortably rely on the racist image of violence that is projected onto Muslims, Palestinians and Arabs to justify their bigoted uneven approach.

Every day, I receive news alerts of a bombing in Gaza or a settler terrorist attack in the West Bank. My phone consists of videos of the charred remains of people who looked and spoke like me. On campus, behind the forced image of glossy DEI, our university funds the genocide in Gaza via its adamant insistence on investing in the military-industrial complex. Those with a shred of consciousness understand what is so vitally clear: the genocide in Gaza is immoral, racist and consistent with an agenda of selfish, capitalist and colonial moral depravity. The University — via Ono, the Board of Regents and the Ono administration — unlike normal, moral beings, weaponize islamophobia to continue arming their institutional power in line with the Israeli genocide machine. Put simply, they are comfortable with our people dead, mutilated and charred. With Muslim, Palestinian and Arab students ignored, trashed and retaliated against the backdrop of the University’s investment in the murders of our loved ones, the University of Michigan has made it heartbreakingly evident that they do not see us as Wolverines.

MiC Contributor Eman Naga can be reached at enaga@umich.edu.

Related articles