Terrorism Prosecutions, Material Support, and Islamophobia
Abstract With Islamophobia rife and the government list of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) telling us who is a threat, marginalized populations are being targeted and can expect a hostile and negative prosecutorial outcome. The large majority of terrorism prosecutions center on material support charges, which by their very structure concentrate on FTOs that are largely Islamist in ideology. Attaching a terrorist taint to a population based on its religious affiliation generates a kind of self-perpetuating law enforcement bias and prosecutorial outcome. Such police state tactics and assumptions only assure the adverse results of insisting that an exceptional status applies to those accused of terrorist activity or support for it. That, in the government's eyes, those individuals stem from one of the major monotheistic faiths in large part, seems to be a foregone conclusion that continues to affect the law's development in largely negative ways.