The "Islamophobia" Regime by Dexter Van Zile - Middle East Quarterly

In a number of recent books, Muslims living in the West are portrayed as hapless victims of oppression and their non-Muslim neighbors as the eternal oppressors.

Middle East Forum : If the nearly uniform narrative offered in a spate of recent books about "Islamophobia" is to be believed, Western Muslims, who enjoy freedoms denied to their brethren in most places in the world, are being tyrannized by hateful white Westerners afflicted with an irrational "phobia" of Islam and its adherents, which drives them to blithely reenact the crimes their ancestors perpetrated in previous centuries against indigenous peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Western hemisphere.

In these books, Muslims living in the West are the hapless victims of oppression, and their non-Muslim neighbors are the eternal oppressors. Accordingly, these oppressors can only offload their burden of civilizational guilt (and the punishment it invites) by confessing their sins (and those of their ancestors), engage in acts of contrition, and convert, either to Islam itself or to a political agenda that acquiesces in Islamist assaults on the rights historically accorded to citizens in Western democracies. Under this arrangement, the only rights that need to be protected are those of Muslims; non-Muslims have no rights, only rules and liabilities.

To stay out of trouble under this arrangement, non-Muslim Westerners must offer effusive praise for Muslims or remain silent about all things Islamic. They must agree to have their speech policed by a coalition of Islamists and their leftist political fellow travelers and the public institutions this coalition has either captured or rendered ineffective.

To enforce this silence, non-Muslims who dare speak about the relationship between Islamic doctrine, Islamism, and jihadist violence are lumped in with Islamic terrorists who "misunderstand" or "pervert" their faith and kill people in its name. In the upside-down environment created by the "Islamophobia" charge, people who speak critically of Islam, Muslims, Islamism, or Shari'a need to be monitored as much as—if not more than—the Islamists and jihadists themselves.

The Blame Game

The precipitating event for the publication of these recent "Islamophobia" books and the popularization of the narrative they offer, appears to be the candid, unrestrained, and, in some instances, admittedly hyperbolic discussion of Islamic violence and unregulated immigration into the United States that erupted during Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The authors of these books deploy the "Islamophobia" accusation in a transparent effort to put the genie of free speech about these issues back into the bottle from which it escaped with Trump's rise to power.

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