Introduction: The Racialized Spectacle of Terror: Decolonizing Narratives of Political Violence in the West

Public discourses on terrorism and who is the default terrorist in today's global public discourses are laser-focused on the Muslim subject and Islam.Take violent events in Europe and the United States, which occur regularly.Still, one can hardly find or identify the use of the term terrorism or terrorist when the perpetrator is not perceived as Muslim.Ideologically motivated violence occurs regularly across the globe.Still, it is when the perpetrator is perceived as Muslim through cultural markers, like name or appearance, that the term terrorism is almost exclusively used.A 2018 Institute of Social Policy and Understanding, Equal Treatment report documented the disparities in legal and media responses to ideologically motivated violence.In media coverage alone, the report found that Muslim perceived perpetrators receive 770 percent more media coverage than those not perceived as Muslim perpetrators.Here, terrorism, as a branding uniquely crafted around the Muslim subject, is built upon multilayered history, orientalist discourses, and racialized paradigms that can be traced back to as early as the Crusades, the Inquisition, and, for sure, the colonial era.As such, it is tough to isolate and speak of a singular cause or even a series of causes since the racialized spectacle engulfing the Muslim subject is accumulatively shaped over a long historical trajectory.The racialized present is shaped by the unexamined and constantly entangled racialized past.Thus, to address and remedy the present, we must deconstruct the past and navigate out of its deeply ingrained racialized epistemologies.In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon's seminal work on colonialism and decolonial discourse, the notion of the colonizer's violence is portrayed as being "atmospheric" and inescapable by the colonized population.Critically, Fanon's writings emphasized the psychological dimensions of colonialism and its ideological rootedness in White Supremacist racism.I am borrowing Fanon's "atmospheric" concept on violence to assert that racism and Islamophobia in Western society permeate and contaminate everything like soot and smoke clinging to healthy lungs in the aftermath of a fire.Europe's history is a long book filled with violence and is very bloody.Europe had two world wars in the last century alone.Yes, the second one had Germany using ovens to burn