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Islamophobia” as a weapon of jihad The charge of “Islamophobia” is routinely used to shift attention away from jihad terrorists. After a rise in jihadist militancy and the arrest of eight people in Switzerland on suspicion of aiding suicide bombers in Saudi Arabia, some Muslims in Switzerland were in no mood to clean house: “As far as we’re concerned,” said Nadia Karmous, leader of a Muslim women’s group in Switzerland, “there is no rise in Islamism, but rather an increase in Islamophobia.”5 This pattern has recurred in recent years all over the world as “Islamophobia” has passed into the larger lexicon and become a self-perpetuating industry. In Western countries, “Islamophobia” has taken a place beside “racism,” “sexism,” and “homophobia.” The absurdity of all this was well illustrated by a recent incident in Britain: While a crew was filming the harassment of a Muslim for a movie about “Islamophobia,” two passing Brits, who didn’t realize the cameras were rolling, stopped to defend the person being assaulted. Yet neither the filmmakers nor the reporters covering these events seemed to realize that this was evidence that the British were not as violent and xenophobic as the film they were creating suggested.6 Historian Victor Davis Hanson has ably explained the dangerous shift of focus that “Islamophobia” entails: There really isn’t a phenomenon like “Islamophobia”—at least no more than there was a “Germanophobia” in hating Hitler or “Russophobia” in detesting Stalinism. Any unfairness or rudeness that accrues from the “security profiling” of Middle Eastern young males is dwarfed by efforts of Islamic fascists themselves—here in the U.S., in the UK, the Netherlands, France, Turkey, and Israel—to murder Westerners and blow up civilians. The real danger to thousands of innocents is not an occasional evangelical zealot or uncouth politician spouting off about Islam, but the deliberately orchestrated and very sick anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that floods the airways worldwide, emanating from Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, to be sure, but also from our erstwhile “allies” in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.7
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