But there’s another good reason to see her gone. She is also one of
the chief purveyors of the “Islamophobia” claim—which is used to silence
any meaningful discussion on Islam. Only three days before she was
voted out, she had disparaged House Republicans of being “Ok with Islamophobia.”
And, as might be expected, her being voted out is already being chalked up to—you guessed it—“blatant Islamophobia.”
But while it’s good to see her disempowered, those who rely on the
Islamophobia card are growing. Indeed, wherever one looks, charges of
Islamophobia are increasingly being cast against, and often negatively
impact the security of, non-Muslims. A few examples from just the month
of January, 2023 follow:
- The National Council of Canadian Muslims
“made liberal use of the ‘Islamophobia’ charge to hinder investigations
into Muslim nonprofit organizations accused of funding terror
operations in the Middle East.”
- Canada appointed a rep to “fight Islamophobia,” thereby further hampering free speech, including in the realm of national security.
- Various nations around the world “condemned Islamophobia” in Sweden, after an “extremist” burned a copy of the Koran. NATO member Turkey is going so far as to veto Swedish attempts to join NATO.
- Hamline University in Minnesota accused and fired a professor on the charge of “Islamophobia,” only to retract after being sued for defamation.
- A Paris mosque filed “a complaint against [a] French Islamophobic writer.”
- “Islamophobia is an integral part” of the late Pope Benedict’s “legacy,” one of many op-eds and “influencers” claimed.
- “Global terrorism” was “created by the West,” said an important Pakistani forum, and “has been used as a pretext for spreading Islamophobia in order to target Muslims around the world.”
Those are just a few of the charges to surface in January, 2023. The
year is still young and many more debilitating charges of Islamophobia
are no doubt forthcoming.
Behind all of these past, present, and future accusations lays an assumption: that no one really
ever had any problems with Muslims, until a few terrorist strikes
occurred—chief among them, September 11, 2001—at which point, racist
Westerners were only too happy to jump the gun and paint all Muslims as
terrorists.
As a recent Al Jazeera article titled,
“Decades after 9/11, Muslims battle Islamophobia in US,” claims: “The
September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States ushered in a new era of
hate crimes, racism, and xenophobia against Muslims.”
Reality is quite different. In fact, aversion to Islam is as old as
Islam itself. In this sense, the claim that Islamophobia is an actual
phenomenon is accurate: non-Muslims have always feared Islam; but there was—and is—nothing irrational about this fear, as the word “phobia” implies.
From the very start, Western peoples, including many of their
luminaries, portrayed Islam as a hostile and violent force—often in
terms that would make today’s “Islamophobe” blush. There’s a reason for
that. In 628 AD, Muhammad summoned the Roman (or “Byzantine”) emperor,
Heraclius—the symbolic head of “the West,” then known as
“Christendom”—to submit to Islam. When the emperor refused, a virulent
jihad was unleashed against the Western world. Less than 100 years
later, Islam had conquered more than two-thirds of Christendom, and was
raiding deep into France.
While these far-reaching conquests are often allotted a sanitized
sentence, if that, in today’s textbooks, the chroniclers of the time
make clear that these were cataclysmic events that had a traumatic
impact on, and played no small part in forming, Europe proper, that is,
the unconquered portion and final bastion of Christendom. In the words
of historian Franco Cardini,
[I]f we … ask ourselves how and when the modern notion of
Europe and the European identity was born, we realize the extent to
which Islam was a factor (albeit a negative one) in its creation.
