[Order Robert Spencer’s new book, ‘Intifada on the Hudson: The Selling of Zohran Mamdani’: CLICK HERE.]

As everyone knows but few will ever admit, “Islamophobia” is an imaginary ailment. Sure, there are some people here and there who say unkind things to Muslims just because they are Muslims, and some even who do violence to innocent Muslims, just as there are some people who do violence to people of every race, creed, and color. The idea, however, that Muslims in the U.S. are being victimized, brutalized, and discriminated against on a large scale in America today is sheer fantasy with a frankly insidious intent: it is designed to intimidate people into silence regarding jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women.

That fiction is widespread, and far more so than the alleged malady is now or has ever been. Now, however, a Muslim writer has claimed to have discovered the antidote in, of all places, the recent meeting in the Oval Office between President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Sarchi Aziz wrote Wednesday in the Muslim publication S2J News about the marvelous and surprising event:

On 21st November 2025 came a political plot twist no one expected. President Donald Trump and New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani met in the Oval Office. A moment widely expected to be tense, instead turned into one of the most unexpectedly calm and constructive political encounters of the year. Their exchange was measured, direct and largely cooperative. It has already triggered an intense reaction online and across media platforms.

Aziz explained that “what made the meeting remarkable was largely the shift in tone, posture and interaction between two men who, until now, had publicly criticised each other with sharp rhetoric.” Trump, according to Aziz, had likened Mamdani to London’s Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan, whom Trump disliked, Aziz claimed, not because of his policies, but solely because of “who Khan was. A Muslim man.” This strained credulity, as Khan’s tenure as mayor has seen London degenerate into a squalid, crime-ridden hellhole, but Aziz took no notice of that.

Instead, Aziz claimed that Trump had criticized “revived parts of that same vocabulary” in criticizing Mamdani, as if the problem were the president’s “Islamophobia” and not Mamdani’s Marxism and determination to implement multiply-failed socialist policies that will destroy New York City just as they have destroyed London. Then, however, came Trump’s unexpectedly cordial meeting with Mamdani, and Sarchi Aziz professed to see in it a sign of hope.

“The meeting,” Aziz wrote, “doesn’t guarantee a new political era. But it does offer a glimpse of what politics could look like when confrontation is set aside long enough for leaders to engage on shared challenges…. If anything, the meeting proved that humanisation remains the most effective antidote to Islamophobia.”

This has been a constant theme of “Islamophobia” propagandists for years. It’s based on the false premise that “Islamophobia,” broadly understood as dislike of Islam or Muslims, stems from ignorance and prejudice. One doesn’t know what Islam teaches, or dislikes “brown people” for some reason. Muslims are of all races, as are Islamic jihadis, but that quite obvious fact never enters into these discussions. The antidote to “Islamophobia” is then posited: if someone simply gets to know a Muslim, one will see that they’re just ordinary folks like everyone else. No reason to fear. No reason to be concerned about the sharply rising Muslim population in Europe and the U.S.

Some years ago, I was speaking at some university and got into a conversation before the event with three kindly young Muslim students, one of whom asked me in due course if I knew any Muslims personally, and if that relationship made me want to revise any of my writings.

That young man was working from the same false premise. He looked surprised and annoyed when I told him no, that I wouldn’t change a thing, because nothing I had written was based on ignoring or denying the fact that Muslims could be good people. I was discussing the ideology taught in the Qur’an and Sunnah, not the people. Articles such as Sarchi Aziz’s piece about the Trump-Mamdani meeting appear to be designed to obscure that distinction, so that no one ever gets around actually to examining the ideology of Islam.

Doing so could lead to “Islamophobia,” so it’s much easier simply to try to intimidate people into thinking that the problem is really just one of a racial prejudice that any decent person should be ashamed of harboring in this enlightened age. That enterprise will continue, as even now it remains largely unchallenged.