“The United States government is intent on targeting all marginalized communities,” stated American Muslim activist and author Maha Hilal during a February 23 Georgetown University webinar. 

Introducing her new book, Innocent until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience since 9/11, she presented America’s post-9/11 defensive War on Terror (WOT) as manifesting America’s inherent evil. Hilal spoke for Georgetown’s Saudi-founded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU). 

Her moderator was Mobashra Tazamal, a senior research fellow at ACMCU’s Bridge Initiative, which, in the name of combating “Islamophobia,” defames any and all critics of Islam. Fittingly, Hilal announced that her book examined “how deeply entrenched ‘Islamophobia’ has been in the War on Terror from the very beginning.” 

Always the victim, Hilal claimed that the “very intentional targets of the war on terror” were not the Americans and others attacked by jihadists such as Al Qaeda, but Muslims. She marveled at the “uncomfortable fact” that at the American military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “all of those detained have been Muslim,” as if non-Muslims were responsible for 9/11 and its aftermath. 

For Hilal such laws are “particularly problematic” in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. She suggested that organizations such as the Holy Land Foundation merely donated to Hamas in order to alleviate human suffering, whitewashing how Hamas regularly diverts any such aid to terrorism against Israelis. This is a “very calculated way of criminalizing and demonizing anyone who would dare to support individuals that are in need,” she lied, adding for good measure that the “U.S. government wants to criminalize Muslims and Muslim communities.” 

Accordingly, Hilal called on the U.S. “to dismantle in the war on terror” effective law enforcement measures such as “surveillance” and “federal terrorism prosecution.” She decried unspecified “draconian immigration policies” post-9/11 that sought “to really cement and entrench criminality into the ways we understand immigration,” even though many of the 9/11 hijackers violated immigration laws.