Over the past two months, protest marches in solidarity with the Palestinian people have taken place all across the United States and Canada. They have attracted a diverse crowd of people, including many Indigenous nations and communities.
Participants have denounced “US imperialism” for enabling Israeli aggression, ethnic cleansing and genocide while others have charged Israel itself with “settler colonialism”.
However, many attendees – especially pro-Palestinian immigrants – have failed to comprehend their own relationship to settler colonialism. Many of us see the US and Canada as secular democracies that provide good economic opportunities and not as settler-colonial societies, serving as the blueprint for Israel. We have ignored our own complicity as settlers.
Muslims and South Asian, North African and Arab immigrant settlers must interrogate the legitimacy of America’s and Canada’s right to exist and the costly trade-off they make in taking on national identities in these countries that come at the expense of Indigenous peoples at “home” and imperialist adventurism abroad.
A significant number of migrant Muslims do not seem to comprehend that American societies are animated by white supremacist religious doctrines such as manifest destiny and doctrines of discovery and terra nullius, Protestant ethics, common law property rights, and Victorian notions of gender and sexuality.
Rather, Muslim “arrivants” to the US should consider the history of settler colonialism in the Americas – a history that sees Islamophobia and anti-Indigenous narratives as well as anti-Blackness and anti-Jewishness inextricably bound.
In the late 15th century, Christopher Columbus’s conquistador invasion of the Americas commenced as the European Crusading eviction, murder and forced conversion of Muslims and Jews in Andalusia was coming to an end.
There, Muslims and Jews were racially and religiously cast as “enemies”, “savages” and “heathens”, an othering that tinted the lens through which Columbus and his successors saw Indigenous peoples in the Americas, describing them as “blood drinkers”, “cannibals” and “devils”.
As Alan Mikhel writes in his book God’s Shadow, Columbus described the weapons used by the Indigenous Taíno people of the Caribbean as “alfanjes, the Spanish name for the scimitars used by Muslim soldiers”, while Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés identified 400 Aztec temples in Mexico as “mosques”, described “Aztec women” as “Moorish women” and referred to Montezuma, the Aztec leader, as a “sultan”.
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