ABSTRACT
The battles over masking only amplified preexisting culture and race wars in which entrenched libertarianism and neoliberal individualism evaded the economic and existential precarity caused by degraded social welfare and state health care. Counterterrorism projects such as Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) introduced by Barack Obama have relied on recruitment of community members, social service providers, and educators for self-surveillance and self-regulation of political expression and community organizing: a liberal counterterrorism approach for "reformist reform.” 5 Nabeel Abraham and Will Youmans provide important analyses of the "Containment System” in response to the War on Terror, based on "entrepreneurial opportunism” (Rodríguez) by Arab and Muslim American educators, professionals, and community leaders (including in the nonprofit industrial complex), some of whom collaborated with federal and state agencies.6 Academic Containment Reckoning with these critiques from critical Arab American or Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) studies requires grappling with the long history of anti-Arab/Muslim state policies of surveillance, policing, and mass incarceration that preceded 2001. The Zionist lobby and anti-Palestinian organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League have increasingly deployed the language of tolerance and civility to tar critics of Israel with charges of anti-Semitism.7 These liberal strategies, illustrating Rodríguez's argument, can be more damaging than frontal attacks on the Palestine justice movement because the language of racism is harder to challenge