In addition, the metropolitan Detroit area is home to a sizable Lebanese American population, which, like the Iraqi community, is overwhelmingly Shiite. The sectarian demographics of the city have equipped DHS, and local law enforcement, with the added ability to turn Muslim American communities against one another—to mobilize Shiite Muslim Americans as informants or full-fledged partners against their Sunni Muslim American counterparts. In effect, this imports the sectarian divides of the Arab world into structural Islamophobic counterterror programming at home, in an effort to uncover the homegrown radical—who is far less real than imagined.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques that the homegrown-radical threat is exaggerated while surveillance is expanded through communal divisions.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 395