For years I have denied the label “Islamophobe,” because it is most commonly used to refer to people who have an irrational bigotry or hatred toward Muslims, and I don’t. I am not the “bad” kind of Islamophobe who wants any innocent people, Muslim or non-Muslim, to be victimized. Instead I am what I would call the “good” kind of Islamophobe, someone who is honest enough to call a problem a problem, even when the whole world wishes to ignore and deny its existence.
The problem with most analyses of Islamophobia is that they tend to condemn under the same rubric of bias and bigotry any analysis of how jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and make recruits among peaceful Muslims. Just this week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded to a question from opposition leader Andrew Scheer about the security threat posed by returning ISIS jihadis, not by addressing that threat, but by accusing Scheer of “Islamophobia” for raising it.
If that’s Islamophobia, everyone should be an Islamophobe.
The jihad threat is real, and growing worldwide, as the evidence of over 30,000 jihad attacks worldwide since 9⁄11 shows. Nonetheless, “Islamophobia” has become, for all intents and purposes, a larger threat than jihad terror, although accused “Islamophobes” have never left as much havoc in their wake as jihadis have. And “Islamophobia” endangers us all in other ways as well.
In December 2015 in San Bernardino, when the Islamic jihadist couple Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered fourteen people at a Christmas party, a friend of one of their neighbors recalled that the neighbor had told him about suspicious activity at the couple’s home. “Sounds like she didn’t do anything about it,” the friend remembered. “She didn’t want to do any kind of racial profiling. She’s like, ‘I didn’t call it in … maybe it was just me thinking something that’s not there.’”
“She didn’t want to do any kind of racial profiling.” For years she had been force-fed the notion that to be suspicious of Muslims was “bigotry” and “racial profiling” – “Islamophobia” – and so she didn’t alert police to the strange activity at the home of Farook and Malik.
Fourteen people were dead so that politically correct niceties could be preserved, and no one incurred any charges of “racism.”
This wasn’t a singular incident. The fear of “Islamophobia” charges has overridden, or threatened to override, concern about jihad terrorism for years.
Yet let us review the ways in which Islamic jihad and Sharia pose a danger to various groups who typically consider themselves liberal:
This is the case I make in my new book Confessions of an Islamophobe, the book to give to liberals who suspect that concern about jihad terror may be just… “Islamophobia.” Get your copy here.
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