The Center for American Progress is fine with Neera Tanden's Islamophobia
After a decade of this the pattern is clear: Neera will tweet through it and CAP's board will look the other way.
Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden is facing a firestorm of criticism after promoting an Islamophobic attack on left streamer Hasan Piker on Tuesday. That’s when Tanden retweeted this:
If you are unfamiliar with the term, taqiyya is essentially just the Arabic equivalent of what English speakers call a “white lie,” a lie that is justifiable; but as Carnegie scholar H.A. Hellyer explains,
the word has been popularised and weaponised by anti-Muslim discourse…with grave consequences. For how better to ensure Muslims can never have a voice, or take part in public deliberation, or make certain grievances known, than by insinuating that they are, as a religion, deceitful?
This of course is precisely what Loomer, an infamous white supremacist and Trump ally, is attempting to do. As she has put it herself,
The biggest mistake you can ever make is trusting the word of a Muslim. Muslims are taught to engage in Taqiyya, the act of “permissible lying”. In every mosque, Muslims are taught it’s ok to lie for the sake of advancing Islam…This is mainstream Islam. It can’t be negotiated with.
Nothing I’ve said here is obscure or even easy to miss; it’s been public knowledge for years. Nearly a decade ago Slate released a popular video about the taqiyya trope; in 2015, Shakira Hussein noted how it specifically emerged during Barack Obama’s first term in office:
Taqiyya scare-mongering has a strong online presence and is beginning to enter mainstream media…This paranoia reaches its logical conclusion with the "secret Muslim" rumours surrounding U.S. President Barack Obama…he is under fire for his alleged invisible, clandestine identity as a Muslim.
This of course was precisely the paranoia that swept Donald Trump into office.
Loomer, meanwhile, has long been recognized as a major figure in “the Islamophobia Industry”. As Jasmin Zine notes in a scholarly analysis of North American Islamophobic networks for the Islamophobia Studies Journal, Loomer “has been a benificiary of Shillman Fellowships” set up by major Republican donor Robert Shillman, “who is reported to support US far-right groups that have railed against Muslims and refugees.” CAP knows all of this, of course; in fact, Zine explicitly acknowledged in her study that she built it on the work of Fear Inc., a study on Islamophobia released by CAP in 2011.
Some of the loudest criticism of Tanden, incidentally, has been from the authors of Fear Inc:
But while all of these posts seem to be proceeding as if informing CAP about Tanden’s behavior and demanding a response will elicit any kind of accountability, the odds that CAP’s leadership will take even the barest action to defend their ostensible liberal values are pretty close to zero.
This is not the first, or the second, or even the third article I’ve written about Neera Tanden’s toxic public behavior. And neither am I the only person to bring it up; on the contrary, just about every major media profile of Tanden over the last decade has touched on it. Tanden’s social media presence also, famously, became a national scandal and a major embarrassment for the incoming Biden administration when it was forced to withdraw her Cabinet nomination in 2021.
Everyone at CAP knows who Neera Tanden is and what she does. By now, it’s almost certain that every single member of CAP’s board - Anthony Blinken, Julian Castro, Steve Daetz, Blair Effron, Jane Hartley, Andrew Hauptman, Molly McUsic, Kristin Mugford, John Podesta, Donald Sussman, and Hansjorg Wyss — has heard about her promotion of Loomer and the Islamophobic “taqiyya” attack. And now that we are about two days into the scandal, it’s become perfectly clear that Tanden is going to do exactly what she always does. She is going to simply ignore the public backlash and tweet through it with complete confidence that CAP will refuse to uphold its ostensible values or defend its diminishing reputation.
All you have to do is look at how Neera’s ideological allies talk about her to see what is really going on here. As Jonathan Chait put it, those who are in “geographic proximity to Tanden” see her as a “truth-telling hero” who leaves colleages “impressed and even awed by” her “pithy brutality.” Just look at this article: the entire thing is Chait revelling in Tanden’s willingness to say what they’re all thinking. And she’s particularly gleeful when Tanden punches left: in one unusually revealing passage, Tanden calls Black Lives Matter activists “assholes” and announces to one of Clinton’s operatives, “I’m going to war on this on twitter.” In another — an email to board member John Podesta — she calls critics of her meeting with Netanyahu “freaks”.
If you have ever worked in any kind of public-facing organization in DC the dynamic at work here is unmistakeable. With the failed Cabinet nomination putting a ceiling on her career and no future ambitions to protect, Neera Tanden has settled into the role of CAP’s attack dog, the keyboard warrior who gets to say out loud what they’re all thinking. Tanden’s colleagues see her reputation as an irresponsible loose canon as an asset, because it means that she can use the platform they’ve given her to advance their agenda while staying out of the mud themselves. It is, notably, the exact same strategy that the Trump administration has used with hard right figures like Laura Loomer to advance their own extreme politics while keeping a respectable distance.
Tanden’s colleagues may not openly endorse her Islamophobic attacks on other Democrats, but after a decade of this kind of thing it just isn’t plausible to pretend like they don’t know what’s going on. CAP isn’t going to apologize for Neera’s bigotry, because they agree with her.
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