Combating Islamophobia Day: Thinking And Talking Points

The United Nations has dedicated March 15^th as the International Day To Combat Islamophobia. The resolution was submitted by Pakistan last year on behalf of all Muslim nations. It was unanimously adopted by the UN, although India and France shared reservations about it.

March 15, 2023 will be the first time that day will be used to combat Islamophobia.

Islamophobia has real world consequences. It is leading to genocide in countries where Muslims are a minority. It impacts the life of Muslims in the Western world as well. There is even a version of Islamophobia in the Muslim world where secular, westernized elites have adopted the vocabulary and rhetoric of this hate to target observant Muslims.

We have talking points and thinking points below, but here are some action items that you and your community can organize and participate in.

Action Items:

Can your interfaith group organize a workshop, vigil, or other event?
Is your city and state commemorating this day? If not, you can encourage them to do so. It can be an educational process.
Can your congressperson and senator address Islamophobia that day?
What does your Masjid, Islamic center, or community organization plan to do?
What does your MSA plan to do?
Can your full-time and Islamic weekend school organize a program about it?

Justice For All is organizing a lobbying day for the US Senate to pass an Islamophobia bill on March 6-7, 2023. Please join it: Register Here for it.

Talking Points

Islamophobia is the hatred and hostility toward Islam and Muslims, manifested in prejudice, harassment, and discrimination. It is reinforced by a history of conflict, both real and perceived, between Islam as a faith and civilization, and the West. The “West” refers to the countries, culture and civilization represented by Europe, North America, and Australia.
The term “Islamophobic” is an adjective used to describe beliefs, opinions, and actions that express Islamophobia. The word “Islamophobe” is a noun referring to an individual who holds and acts on beliefs and opinions that are Islamophobic.
Islamophobia is a form of intolerance, just as bigotry aimed at African-Americans is racism, and prejudice against Jews is anti-Semitism.
Critics of the phenomenon of Islamophobia argue that it is a charge used to silence any type of criticism of Islam and Muslims. This is incorrect.
Criticism of Islam and Muslims has existed for centuries, however, it has now been weaponized against Muslims and is found in countless books, articles, and blogs on this topic. That is the reason it is critical to differentiate between criticism and Islamophobia. Before Islamophobia there was Orientalism. Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism, which was published in 1979 describes this form of centuries-old, “scholarly” bigotry in detail.
Islamophobia spread through Facebook in Burma led to the genocide of Rohingya Muslims. In India, Whatsapp was the platform of choice to spread Islamophobia that has led to lynching of Indian Muslims.
In India there is fascist hysteria against Muslims being promoted through films of Bollywood, where audiences stand up shouting slogans against Muslims
In Europe at least 12 countries have Islamophobic bans on Halal meat and Hijab.
Islamophobia is distinct from criticism of Islam in that Islamophobia doesn’t just seek debate with Islam and Muslims. Rather, Islamophobes seek to foment hatred, bigotry and hostility towards Islam and Muslims.
One example of this is in a statement made by neoconservative polemicist Daniel Pipes, who is considered one of America’s top Islamophobes. In a 1990 article in the National Review, he wrote, "Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene ... All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most."

Thinking Points

To fight anti-Semitism, the Jewish community has heavily invested in information, media, politics, and coalitions. Muslims must do the same.
Islamophobia is the continuation of a pattern of denigration and dehumanization that began when the first large-scale contact between Christians and Muslims occurred with the Crusades of the eleventh century. This was a series of Christian-initiated wars aimed at wresting control of Jerusalem from Muslims. The Crusades set the stage for centuries of irrational fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims.
As author Karen Armstrong has written: “Before the Crusades, Europeans knew very little about Muslims. But after the conquest of Jerusalem, scholars began to cultivate a highly distorted portrait of Islam, and this Islamophobia, entwined with a chronic anti-Semitism, would become one of the received ideas of Europe.
She continues: “At a time when feudal Europe was riddled with hierarchy, Islam was presented as an anarchic religion that gave too much respect and freedom to menials, such as slaves and women. Christians could not see Islam as separate from themselves; it had become, as it were, their shadow-self, the opposite of everything that they thought they were or hoped they were not.” http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27b/095.html
It was Islamophobia that led to the fall of Muslim Spain in the 15th century, when a group of united Christian kingdoms ended over 700 years of Muslim rule in the country by forcing Muslims and Jews to convert, be expelled from their homeland, or be killed.
This view of Muslims as the barbaric “Other” continued in the fifteenth century, when Europeans began colonizing different parts of the world, including Muslim lands. Dehumanizing Muslims and denigrating their faith was critical in justifying colonization, the theft of natural resources and retaining control of the people, just as doing the same to Africans was required to justify their enslavement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Today, Islamophobic arguments have been used to justify the American occupation of Iraq, the bombing and occupation of Afghanistan, which was also not involved in 9/11, as well as discussions about attacking Iran and Syria.
Islamophobia is predicated on the belief that Islam and Muslims are “the Other”, the polar opposite of everything that Western culture represents. Generally, this has crystallized into particular beliefs about Islam and Muslims, specifically, that they are barbaric, violent and misogynist. In contrast, North Americans and Northern Europeans are enlightened, peaceful and support the advancement of women and women’s rights.
One of the best examples of this view can be found in Samuel Huntington’s theory of The Clash of Civilizations http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19930601faessay5188/samuel-p-huntington/the-clash-of-civilizations.html in which Huntington argues that, conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world. One of these civilizations is Islamic civilization, which he considers a major rival for power with Western civilization. In this essay, Huntington wrote of the "bloody borders" between Islamic and non-Islamic civilizations.
In Western countries where Muslims live as religious minorities, the belief that Muslims are “the Other” and part of a civilization representing values that are the opposite of Western values is expressed by descriptions of Muslims as a “fifth column”.

Islamophobia and the media

The media, that is, newspapers, television programs, radio shows and websites have all, at some point, been purveyors of Islamophobia.
A 2022 study of over 20 years of media coverage that analyzed over 700,000 articles alone in the American, British, Canadian, and Australian media conclusively found that found that coverage of Muslims is "overwhelmingly" more negative on average in comparison to other ethnic groups
In the United States, hosts of radio talk shows, particularly those espousing right-wing political views, have made Islamophobic statements on a consistent basis.
In their book Islamophobia: Making Muslims The Enemy, Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg note that one way that the media foments Islamophobia is by publishing the views, comments and actions of Muslims almost exclusively when they are violent actors. Condemnations of terror issued by groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations are routinely ignored.

Further Reading

Islamophobia: the only acceptable racism

http://soundvision.com/info/racism/islamophobia.asp

Wikipedia on Islamophobia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamophobia

Islamophobia Worse in America Now Than after 9/11, Survey Finds

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0310-07.htm

Islamophobia: A Challenge for us all

http://www.runnymedetrust.org/publications/currentPublications.html#islamophobia

UK 'Islamophobia' rises after 11 September

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2223301.stm

CAIR’s page on Islamophobia