A phobia is defined as an irrational fear. People develop phobias to almost anything – spiders, heights and even beautiful women (really – it’s called “venustraphobia”). Though phobias are technically a psychological phenomenon, words with the suffix “-phobia” have entered common parlance to denote prejudice against certain people as well. One such phobia commonly spoken of in the west is Islamophobia. Since the Rushdie Affair in 1989, and even more so since 9/11, distrust towards Islam in the United States has been high. It has now reached the point that one of the ways to discredit the President is simply by calling him a Muslim.
Negative attitudes toward Islam and its adherents have in recent times shown their most vicious face. This August, in a span of one and a half weeks, there were eight attacks at houses of worship, with the target of seven of these being mosques. (The remaining one was the racially motivated shooting spree and domestic terrorist attack at the Sikh Gurdwara in Wisconsin, which killed seven people, including the shooter, and injured four.) These attacks included a rifle shot at a wall (behind which 500 people were praying), a bottle bomb (which luckily did not break through the targeted window), property defacement, eggs, oranges, BB gun pellets and, perhaps most spiteful of all, pig legs.
The aversion has extended beyond such individual exhibitions. This month, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, an anti-Islamic organization, ran anti-Palestinian advertisements on San Francisco buses that read (emphasis added): “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”
Apart from the ahistoricism (as a friend pointed out, “If this was the guiding principle, Jews and Christians would have been obliterated by the Romans two thousand years ago.”), the ad reflects a factually inaccurate outlook. Whether in Israel and Palestine, or in the United States, it is not the Muslims who take first place in “savagery.” According to B’Tselem figures from June 2012, since the Second Intifada began in September 2000, 6,627 Palestinians (including civilians and militants) and foreign citizens have been killed by Israeli security forces and citizens. On the other hand, the Palestinians have killed 1,826 Israelis, alleged Palestinian informants for Israel and foreign citizens. Here in the United States, according to an Anti-Defamation League report from August 2011, 10 times more deaths have resulted from right-wing terrorism since 9/11 than from Muslim terrorism. As per the report, which was written before the Gurdwara shooting, only 7 percent of deaths due to domestic terrorism have been because of Muslim terrorists, as compared to 85 percent because of white supremacists
Yet, in this same phase, it’s brown-skinned people who have almost exclusively faced increased racial profiling at airports. It is Muslims who have comprised the entirety of American citizens killed on Presidential orders without due process. And it is regarding Islam that a “phobia” has lodged itself into our language and thoughts.
Despite the broader, non-technical meaning the suffix is intended to take on here, is it apt to use it in this context? There may be a fear of Muslims, but there is much more than that. The word “Islamophobia” does not capture the hostility that extends beyond the fear; instead, it intrinsically downplays it. The point we should be focusing on in the current state of affairs is not that Muslims are objects of fear in this country, it is that they are victims of hate. They are hated for usually not looking like most people here. They are hated for not conforming to the most popular religion in this country. And perhaps most importantly, they are hated because they have been scapegoated as the enemy figure of our times to breed nationalistic and religious solidarity, and deceptively portrayed by institutions of power as the great evil we must unite against.
The fact still stands: Islam is hardly the biggest threat to the people of this country. Indeed, it may well be the other way around, looking at U.S. foreign policy and the recent instances of vigilante assaults across the nation. Far from an innocent fear, the attitude of animosity towards Muslims is unjustified, and as it shifts attention from more substantive threats, also unwise. With seven attacks on mosques in 11 days this month, and clear calls for enmity against Islam on public buses, this should be a time for reckoning – Are we too attached to the comfort of unaccountability? Or, rising above the convenience of blame and blind antagonism, will we face the values and people most behind terror?