The american government policy response to homegrown terrorism.

Abstract

In any society, questions on the appropriate scale and role of authority in matters of citizens‘ rights and liberties lead to competing visions. Recently, the measures adopted to maintain domestic security in the face of threats to society revived such debates. The issue is how far that authority‘s response is legitimate when it uses security precautions at the expense of people‘s freedoms. In this thesis, we aim to assess the legitimacy of the U.S. government‘s response to homegrown terrorism. We examine the U.S. government‘s policies and we show how far they are dual regarding the treatment of Muslims. Indeed, on one side, they promote non-discriminatory measures, and on the other side, however, they fixate almost entirely on Islam, consider Muslims as suspects and identify Muslims‘ places of worship as a venue of radicalization. We question the legitimacy of such policies by assessing key assumptions underlying the U.S. government discourse on which these policies are based. To that end, we take a genealogical approach to identify the roots of such assumptions. We find that the U.S. government is reproducing past discourses. Then, we use theological arguments, scholarly contributions, and current data to evaluate the soundness of the assumptions underlying these discourses. We conclude that the measures that encroach on Muslims‘ freedoms are illegitimate in that they derive from discourses based on flawed assumptions.