“Islamophobia has declined among other groups but has increased among Muslims.”
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
“We find that over time, Islamophobia has declined among other groups but has increased among Muslims,” the latest scaremongering report on Islamophobia warns.
The claim comes from Dalia Mogahed, a former Obama adviser and Islamist ally, at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. Like its Islamist allies, the ISPU’s reports exist to clamor that Islamophobia is an overriding threat from bigoted Americans still upset over 9/11.
But the latest report has to admit that there’s hardly any imaginary ‘Islamophobia’ to be found.
Except among Muslims.
Alongside all the good news that 6 out of 10 Muslims support Biden, critical race theory and gun control, there was some unhappy news for ISPU to reveal. The report’s “Islamophobia index” asked questions such as are Muslims especially violent and do they hate America?
Americans only scored 25 out of 100 on the Islamophobia Index. Muslims however scored 26.
A Religion News Service article headlined the story, “US Muslims have negative stereotypes about themselves.”
This puts Muslims far ahead of Jews (17) and Protestants (23) in the Great Islamophobia Race.
Do Jews and Protestants know Islam better than Muslims do? Mogahed is reduced to arguing that Bob Cohen and Dave Andrews are more credible than Mohammed Al-Masri.
24% of Muslims believe that Muslims are more prone to violence. 35% of Arab Muslims believe that to be true. 19% of Muslims say that “most Muslims living in the US are hostile to the US.” Among Muslim men that number rises to 23% and among Arab Muslims to 31%.
Only 5% of Americans, 5% of Jews, 6% of Catholics and 7% of evangelicals believe Muslims are less civilized than others. 19% of Muslims however say that it’s true. 11% of Muslims strongly believe that it’s true. 23% of Muslim men agree that Muslims are less civilized. 29% of young Muslims believe it, and 34% of Arab Muslims think that Muslims are less civilized.
Islamic activists have spent two decades falsely accusing Americans of Islamophobia for being concerned about Islamic violence.
What does it mean that more Muslims believe that Muslims are violent than Americans do?
ISPU’s survey blames what it calls Muslim Islamophobia on Americans. But that doesn’t explain why a third of Arab Muslims believe something that only one in twenty Americans believes.
In 2018, the ISPU survey found that 18% of Muslims believe that Muslims are “more prone to violence”. Since then the number of Jews who agree that Muslims are more prone to violence fell from 15% to 9% and the number of Catholics who think so declined from 12% to 8%.
This drop was likely driven by the shortage of recent successful Islamic attacks in America.
But the number of Muslims who believe that Muslims are more prone to violence shot up from 18% to 24%. Why would Muslims become more likely to think that they’re violent even as Americans come to believe the opposite? Americans are paying attention to the national news, while Muslim immigrants are more likely to be tracking the news in their own home countries.
While Islamists are prone to blaming everything on America, this has nothing to do with us. Islamic violence in America and other western nations is a spillover from the Muslim world.
Muslims know it even if Americans willfully deny it.
Last month, Salman Rushdie, born into a Kashmiri Muslim family, was brutally stabbed by a Shiite Lebanese Muslim over a novel from the 80s mildly tweaking Islam. Rushdie was the most famous of the many Muslim immigrants who left Islam behind only to live in fear.
Bosch Fawstin, a regular artist and writer at Front Page Magazine, made the journey from being raised as a Muslim to becoming the first targe of ISIS in America when its terrorists attacked the Mohammed cartoon contest in Garland, TX.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the ex-Muslim dissident who had to flee the Netherlands for America, responded to Rushdie’s stabbing by writing, “When Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the death of ‘The Satanic Verses’ author, I thought he was standing up for Islam — and for me. So, a group of us did the best we could: We scribbled the book’s title on a piece of cardboard and burned that. If Rushdie had been murdered then, I would have been happy.”
Many Muslims living in America have come out of bloody war zones like Syria, Iraq and Yemen marked by brutal internecine Muslim violence. They might have very good reasons for recognizing the innate connection of Islam to violence because they actually lived through it.
They’re just not allowed to talk about it.
‘Islamophobia’ was a term coined by Islamists to silence experts on Islamic terrorism. But it did not take long for them to casually deploy the term against Muslims willing to condemn terrorism.
Their idiotic lies were quickly picked up by leftist allies who proceeded to libel Zuhdi Jasser as an “Islamophobe”. The Southern Poverty Law Center was forced to pay out millions in a settlement to Maajid Nawaz after listing him as one of its “anti-Muslim extremists.”
Now the Islamists have convincingly demonstrated that Muslims are the real “Islamophobes”.
If recognizing that Islamic terrorism is a problem makes you an Islamophobe then according to the Islamists a third of Arab Muslims and a quarter of Muslim men are Islamophobes.
When Muslims are more likely to be “Islamophobes” than Americans, that exposes the big lie of the label. What does it even mean that Muslims are afraid of other Muslims? Are they all bigots?
Stuck with her own statistics, Dalia Mogahed borrows from intersectionality to emphasize that, what she calls, “white Muslims”, are much more likely to admit the reality of Islamic violence. Generally Arab Muslims are the ones who identify as white. They also come from the epicenters of Islamic violence. Mogahed, who is Egyptian, doesn’t bother trying to explain what it is that would make Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis or Jordanians more ‘Islamophobic’ than Indonesians.
And if the descendants of Mohammed are more likely to be Islamphobic than converts and the African and Asian peoples their ancestors conquered, what does that say about Islam?
By the end Mogahed is reduced to arguing that Muslims suffer from “internalized Islamophobia” after September 11 because 27% of Muslims, as opposed to only 11% of Muslim converts (even if they’re white), believe that members of their ideology are more prone to violence. That’s an argument that a white female convert like G. Willow Wilson has a more credible take on Islam than actual Muslims who were born into the religion and lived as a part of the culture.
The invention of Islamophobia was a means of shutting down important conversations about Islamic violence. But the violence is very real, even if we are currently experiencing less of it.
Over the last decade, Islamists successfully weaponized false claims of ‘Islamophobia’ to suppress most research and reporting on Islamic terrorism. Law enforcement and intelligence training was shut down. Experts were deplatformed and marginalized. Having run out of counterjihadists to persecute, Islamists are busy accusing Muslims of Islamophobia.
The underlying pattern is the same one driving Muslim violence across the Middle East. When the infidels have been purged or subjugated, the Jihad turns on itself. Sunnis battle Shiites. Salafis fight it out for the claim to absolute power. Terrorist groups splinter. Islam was born out of violence, derives its moral authority from violence and cannot exist in the absence of violence, physical or ideological, against an ‘other’ as its most fundamental form of self-definition.
Politicians initially attributed the mysterious killings of Muslim men in Albuquerque to ‘Islamophobia’. But then the real killer, an Afghan Muslim, was caught. The perpetrator of the worst ‘Islamophobic’ killings in America had been a Sunni Muslim targeting Shiite Muslims.
Muslims know a whole lot more than Americans about the violence inherent in Islam. They might have more to say about it if the Islamists weren’t calling them Islamophobes.
