Why "Islamophobia"?
When used to deny the unique predicament of Jews or immunize the particular vilification of Israel, “Islamophobia” boosts an antisemitic narrative.
After the horrific Hamas attacks of October 7, the White House did the logical thing: it went after “Islamophobia.” Perhaps the appointment of Vice-President Kamala Harris as chair of a new task force on the issue signaled less than total commitment—with the border crisis in her portfolio, she might not have much time for this new assignment—but on November 9, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre made it sound urgent: “For too long, Muslims in America, and those perceived to be Muslim, such as Arabs and Sikhs, have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks and other discriminatory incidents.” Though she mentioned no “discriminatory incidents” against Sikhs that followed from Hamas parading the bodies of raped women through streets of Gaza, she appeared to apply the precautionary principle. The White House was ready for overreactions to perceived Muslim misdeeds. Tactfully left unsaid was the fact that, as Jean-Pierre spoke, Americans were still being held hostage by Muslim terrorists.
Emory University officials joined the effort. For example, Rabbi Jordan Braunig, Jewish Chaplain in Emory’s Office of Spiritual and Religious Life, and his colleague Dr. Isam Vaid, Muslim Religious Life Scholar, introduced an invitation to a “reflective conversation” about the war in Gaza by saying, “The conflict in Israel and Palestine has triggered incidents of Islamophobia, Antisemitism, and Anti-Arab bias, across our country and across the globe.” Even if they did not get the talking point directly from Washington, D.C., these religious leaders had their priorities straight: in the aftermath of October 7, “Islamophobia” took pride of place in their concerns, and, to avoid misunderstanding, antisemitism was carefully sandwiched between it and “Anti-Arab bias.” Similarly, in a Thanksgiving email message Emory president Greg Fenves put things in proper order by noting that he was “outraged by the rise in Islamophobia and antisemitism that has spread across our nation and around the world.” For Fenves, this amounted to a kind of penance: compared to other academic leaders, he had rather strongly denounced Hamas atrocities early on, and after student protesters entered his office building to chant “from the river to the sea,” he had chided them for using antisemitic slogans. That had triggered a faculty open letter complaining that, to paraphrase slightly, students had not meant to sound antisemitic in calling for Israel’s destruction but now felt unsafe as a result of Fenves’ response. His email signaled a subtle mea culpa.
Whence the sudden concern?
It couldn’t be that Muslim Lives Matter. As hundreds of thousands died due to brutal violence in Syria and Yemen, and terror attacks regularly claim civilian victims in Pakistan and northern Nigeria, the world has stayed conspicuously silent. No memorial honors the two Emory students of Muslim descent who died some years ago in a terrorist incident in Bangladesh. When hurt by other Muslims, Muslim lives didn’t matter that much. Even when others are involved—in Myanmar’s oppression of the Rohingya, or China’s oppression of the Uighurs—the world has restrained its indignation. American business leaders happily joined Xi Jinping for dinner on a recent visit. His Islamophobia was none of their business.
Nor could recent trends account for the increased concern. For 2022, the FBI reported 205 anti-Islamic hate crimes in the U.S., a plurality (92) taking the form of intimidation—a decrease from the late 2010s. For the same year, CAIR, not shy about publicizing Islamophobia, reported a decrease in more broadly defined “anti-Muslim incidents” of 23%. Judging by such numbers, the “spread” was receding in the U.S. before the White House and Emory zeroed in on the issue. Also in 2022, the FBI recorded 1305 antisemitic hate crimes, not just six times more serious than anti-Islamic crimes but also an increase from the 1053 incidents in 2019. Yet curiously, in the catalogue of current ills Islamophobia now gets pride of place.
Events at schools and universities also do not seem to account for the concern. For all the high-level attention to Islamophobia, few instances have surfaced in the media, not usually reticent about featuring hateful conduct against a favored group. As of November 16, the Department of Education had received two complaints. Jews, by contrast, have taken the brunt of recent harassment. At Hillcrest High School in Jamaica, Queens, a Jewish teacher had to hide from rampaging students out to get her fired. At Brooklyn’s Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women, girls left class with a teacher to attend a pro-Palestinian rally with signs reading “Please Keep the World Clean.” At Ohio State, two students were reported to be assaulted and Israeli flags vandalized near the campus Hillel Center. At Columbia, students chanted “Long live the intifada” at a supposedly prohibited protest event. At MIT, activists physically prevented Jewish students from attending classes. At Harvard, a divinity student was evicted from university housing for physically accosting a Jewish student during a protest, an incident that also involved the Harvard Law Review editor; a visiting Jewish alumnus observed an ongoing pro-Hamas protest staged in the Widener Library reading room and was accused by foreign students there of being a murderer and supporting genocide. A UC Davis professor tweeted that “zionist journalists” spreading propaganda “should fear us more” than their bosses. At Emory University, a Palestinian-American medical school faculty member was placed on leave after tweeting, “Glory to all resistance fighters.” Of course, the list could be expanded. In educational circles, at least, the supply of antisemitism exceeds that of Islamophobia. (Of course, for many pro-Hamas protesters there is nothing inherently antisemitic about their favorite chant, “from the river to the sea”—that’s just what decolonization looks like.)
Nor does Islamophobia seem to be spreading in public life. In New York City, a former Obama advisor was arrested for harassing a halal food vendor, and the despicable murders of people of Palestinian descent in Chicago and Vermont may prove to be hate crimes. But the antisemites operate on a larger scale. Widespread demonstrations have targeted Jews and vilified Israel. In Philadelphia, a mob that had been calling for “intifada revolution” gathered at Goldie, a falafel shop co-owned by a Jewish Israeli-American, chanting, “Goldie, Goldie you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” In New York City, arsonists set fire to an area outside a Jewish-Japanese restaurant; two women were arrested for attacking a Jewish woman who objected to their tearing down of a “Missing Persons” poster; and at Penn Station, protesters wanted Israel to “go to hell” and equated Zionism with terrorism. In New Hampshire, pro-Hamas protesters were arrested for rioting and sabotage at an Israel-owned defense business. In Los Angeles, a pro-Palestinian protester was arrested for striking an elderly Jewish counterprotester on the head, contributing to his death. In Chicago, former mayor Rahm Emanuel had “Nazis” scrawled on his home. As antisemitism has taken a “sharp left turn,” this list, too, could be expanded. No Muslim businesses or officials, or countries for that matter, have been attacked in the same way, on the same scale. As targets of activist venom, Jews are special.
Worries about the spread of Islamophobia would also seem unnecessary as a form of elite self-flagellation, since Western leaders have in fact practiced consistent anti-Islamophobia.
After 9/11, the U.S. responded with a euphemistically labeled “war on terror”—the first war on a tactic, leaving Islam unmentioned, except when George W Bush declared it a “religion of peace.” In town halls at Emory University, experts quickly assured us that in Islam jihad meant inner spiritual striving; terrorists believing in actual “holy war” had it all wrong.
The Obama administration did not denounce the 2009 killing of 13 people by Major Nidal Hassan at Fort Hood as Islamist terror but termed it “workplace violence.”
After the 2013 Boston marathon bombing, which killed three people and injured hundreds, perpetrator Dzhokhar Tsarnaev got half-sympathetic cover from Rolling Stone—the poor guy had been a “popular, promising student” but “was failed by his family,” so he “fell into” radical Islam and “became a monster.”
Commenting on the 2014 Santa Benardino killing of 14 people by Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, President Obama named neither the terrorists nor their victims, only lamenting the violence in generic terms.
After Omar Mateen killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub in 2016, attention centered on the gay identity of the victims (“they were loved”), not the religious background of the perpetrator who had sworn allegiance to Islamic State.
In 2023, the anti-Islamophobic reflex was also evident abroad. For example, after recent violent attacks by Muslim men on civilians in Paris and Dublin, official responses tried to quell any focus on their identity and instead turned to deploring reactions to the violence.
The pattern of such violence, by Muslims against non-Muslims, raises further questions about “Islamophobia.” To my knowledge, no Jews have committed terrorist acts against non-Jews in any Western country, though on a few occasions, most notoriously in Pittsburgh, they have been the victims of mass killings. As a group, they have done nothing to trigger antisemitism. By contrast, the list of Muslim terrorist atrocities is rather long. Besides the American incidents just mentioned:
in 2004, Jamal Zougam and others bombed Madrid trains, killing 193 and injuring around 2,050 people
in 2005, suicide bombers targeting public transportation in London killed 52 and injured about 700 people
in January 2015, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi killed 12 and injured 11 people in an attack on the office of a Paris magazine, followed by an ally’s siege of a kosher supermarket, in which four Jews were killed
in November 2015, a group of Islamist suicide bombers attacked targets in Paris, killing 130 and injuring more than 400
and in 2017, Salam Abedi bombed a concert venue in Manchester in 2017, killing 22 people and injuring 1,017.
Muslim terrorists also operate on a smaller scale. A selected sample:
in 2004, Mohammed Bouyeri stabbed film maker Theo van Gogh to death on a street in Amsterdam
in 2013, two Muslim “extremists” killed British soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich, UK
in 2020, Abdoullakh Abouyezidovich Anzorov beheaded French teacher Samuel Paty with a cleaver
in 2021, Ali Harbi Ali stabbed MP Sir David Amess to death at his constituency surgery in Leigh-on-Sea, UK
in 2022, at Chautauqua, Hadi Matar stabbed our former colleague Salman Rushdie, causing him to lose an eye; Rushdie had previously lived in hiding under an Iranian fatwa for many years
and in 2023, Abdesalem Lassoued killed two Swedish tourists and injured a third in Brussels.
Of course, these are just the “successful” acts of terror carried out by Muslims. Many others were prevented—most recently, by rounding up a group of Hamas members in Germany and the Netherlands who had plotted anti-Jewish assaults, part of a soaring wave of antisemitic attacks in Europe. No word on planned Jewish terror against Muslim targets.
At what point, presidents Biden and Fenves, does the long string of incidents justify a certain public weariness of radical Muslims? In what way, if any, is that public allowed to connect terrorist violence to precepts of Islam itself? Is all criticism of Muslim misconduct ipso facto a form of Islamophobia? Let’s ask Rushdie.
One more piece of evidence accentuates the Islamophobia puzzle. If Muslim mistreatment by non-Muslims is cause for concern, it would seem reasonable to take mistreatment of non-Muslims by Muslims equally seriously. Yet such even-handedness is oddly missing from recent pronouncements. Islamist terror in the West aside, the most telling example is elite and media silence on Muslim discrimination against Christians. Even at a nominally Christian institution like Emory University, the topic gets little play—no memorial services, no campus events. The destruction of Christian communities in the Middle East, particularly due to Islamic State violence, has not featured prominently in Western news. For example, informal analysis suggests that the Wall Street Journal has devoted more space to the certainly outrageous imprisonment of one of its journalists in Russia than to all the thousands of Christian victims combined. The fate of mostly Christian girls in Nigeria kidnapped by Boko Haram terrorists drew attention in 2014 (“Bring Back Our Girls!”), but Michelle Obama and her fellow activists appear to have lost interest, even though actual violence continues in the country—more than 4,000 Christian villagers killed by Muslim attackers in 2022, according to one NGO report. South of the Sahara, jihadist activity imperils many other Christians. Not just majority-Muslim countries persecute Christians—North Korea is #1—but they are overrepresented in the top 20. The actual far greater spread of Christianophobia—the lack of a proper label is itself a tell—would seem to make the surge in concern for Islamophobia a bit out of proportion.
What, then, made focusing on Islamophobia so exquisitely logical, from the White House to universities? In view of prior elite indifference and anti-Islamophobia, of the disproportionate violence perpetrated by Muslims against non-Muslims, and of the real spread of antisemitism on American campuses and European streets, why does it in fact take precedence?
Naturally, the logic derives from 10/7. Disgust at the atrocities briefly raised support for Israel and made defenses of Islamist terror suspect. From a progressive point of view, that created an uncomfortable imbalance. It gave succor to the oppressor, stymied calls for Israel’s destruction, and tainted enthusiasm for Hamas as antisemitism—still a bit unsavory in the current culture. In Washington, the administration needed a both-sides move; on a campus like Emory, officials could not be seen to favor Jews. Something had to be done to restore balance.
“Islamophobia” does the trick. It serves to temper undue sympathy for Israel and Jews and to blunt criticism of Islamist terror and its supporters. It helps to make opposition to Muslim antisemitism an aspect of Islamophobia. It shields the left, to some extent, from being tarnished by its revival of what Robert Wistrich called “the longest hatred.” Rhetorically, it is a delegitimation device. To bring home the point, it even gets priority—a government task force, first mention in a list of modern prejudices.
Emory’s Greg Fenves stood up for Israel and against antisemitism. But as a properly progressive academic leader, even he has to play the rhetorical game. In that game, the Islamophobia trope serves to deny the uniqueness of threats to Israel and Jews, and to play down the particular vilification they now face. Used in that way, its invocation objectively boosts an antisemitic narrative.