In the 30 months since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Jews around the world have found themselves under siege. The unspeakable atrocities committed against men, women and children that day, combined with the distorted coverage of the Jewish state’s subsequent war of self-defense against its assailants, set off a global tsunami of antisemitism.
While much of this hatred has been promoted by extremists, including right-wing podcasters and left-wing academics, it has nevertheless made itself felt throughout American society. In both popular culture and legacy media, tropes of Jew-hatred focusing on the State of Israel and its supporters have been normalized to the point of becoming commonplace. That wave of hatred has helped incite and inspire a series of violent attacks on Jewish targets, the latest being the assault last week on a Michigan synagogue.
According to The New York Times and the rest of the liberal media, however, the real problem facing American society today is Islamophobia.
A consistent pattern of gaslighting
In articles in outlets ranging from PBS and the British Independent to the Qatar-based Al Jazeera, the narrative is the same. They claim that President Donald Trump’s decision to join with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Iran has set off a wave of hate against American Muslims. A Times editorial claimed that the president isn’t just responsible for legitimizing hate in general, but his policies are inveterately hostile to Muslims. They argue that this is both unjust and even harming American foreign policy.
No one should be subjected to discrimination or abuse based on their faith or ethnicity. But the drumbeat of concern about this topic is part of a recurring pattern. Every time an act of Islamist terror occurs, the same thing happens. The liberal establishment that dominates the media and most every other sector of American culture begins to act as if the priority must be to prevent anyone from drawing conclusions about both the reach and motives of radical Muslims, who believe they are at war with the West.
This is nothing less than gaslighting. As has been the case since the Al-Qaeda attacks on America that took place on Sept. 11, 2001, which set off the first round of worries about Islamophobia, there is no objective evidence of widespread bias against Muslims or Arabs in the United States. The discussion of antisemitism is invariably preceded by citations of hate-crime statistics, including the litany of incidents in which Jews have been targeted.
But that is not the case with Islamophobia because that sort of proof is lacking. Over the course of the last quarter century since 9/11, FBI hate-crime statistics have consistently shown that the number of incidents involving Jews being attacked dwarfs those of any other religious group, including Muslims. The claims of a backlash against Muslims after 9/11 or the Oct. 7 attacks are always anecdotal and/or the product of radical Islamist groups like the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was founded as a front group for those raising funds for Hamas terrorists in the United States.
This isn’t surprising. The purpose of claims related to a trend of discrimination against Muslims isn’t so much a response to a real problem as it is an attempt to distract public attention away from one that actually exists. Accusations of Islamophobia—sometimes, but not always, accompanied by lip service to the plague of antisemitism—are rooted in an effort on the part of Islamists, in addition to their leftist and liberal allies and enablers, to flip the script.
Instead of focusing on the way antisemitism, and even advocacy for violence against Jews and Israel, is normative discourse among Muslims and those who purport to represent them, like CAIR, we are instead lectured about America failing adherents of Islam.
This should be seen in the same context as much of the commentary about Israel since the Oct. 7 attacks—namely, the falsehood that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. The main point about that blood libel is not just that it isn’t true. Israel was fighting a war against a terrorist group that deliberately sought to create civilian casualties by hiding behind them, sheltering their arsenal and their fighters, as well as hostages they held in places where civilians lived. Add to that hospitals, schools and other public areas where large groups of people congregate. The Israel Defense Forces takes more care to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties than any other army in the world.
Accusing Jews of what antisemites do
Israel is accused of genocide because that is what Palestinian Arabs intend for Jews. The orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction was a trailer for what Hamas and the Palestinians wish to do to all of Israel. Therefore, what better way to avoid discussion of that awful fact than to engage in mirroring and accuse the Israelis of what their opponents are actually guilty of doing? Totalitarian movements are, as scholar Hannah Arendt (who was no fan of Israel) wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, invariably accusing their opponents of being guilty of crimes that they have committed, thereby reversing the roles of perpetrators and victims. And they always lie. The Soviet-inspired big lies about Israel that date back to the 1960s effectively erase antisemitism in an effort to demonize Jews.
The same sort of thinking is at work when Israel is accused of behaving like the Nazis by those who applaud groups like Hamas that seek to follow in the footsteps of those responsible for the Holocaust.
That an Islamist apologist group such as CAIR would promote Islamophobia as a major American problem is unsurprising. Their dishonest pose as a civil-rights organization is based on this deceit.
News organizations like the Times and PBS promote the myth of Islamophobia not just because they are fooled by Muslim advocates. They do so because it minimizes the way they have enabled the very real surge in Jew-hatred. They’ve treated advocacy for the destruction of Israel as within the Overton Window of acceptable discourse, something they have never done with respect to any other nation or people. They’ve mainstreamed blood libels against Israel and treated those who advocate for Jewish genocide on college campuses and elsewhere as idealists and human-rights supporters.
The liberal media’s taking up a largely mythical problem of Islamophobic discrimination also excuses their failure to adequately cover the problem of Muslim and Arab antisemitism, both in the United States and elsewhere.
Moreover, the focus on Trump’s alleged callous attitude toward Muslims also fails to take into account that the administration’s conduct or statements aren’t gratuitous bias, but rather invariably a justified reaction to the real problem of Islamist terrorism. The Islamist regime in Iran, and its terrorist auxiliaries and allies such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, are not merely at war with the one Jewish state on the planet, which they seek to destroy. They are also at war with all those who do not share their faith. Their goal is to spread their brands of fanatical Islam throughout the world, both in moderate Muslims countries and nations where Christians and other faiths form the majority.
Trump’s justified efforts to put an end to appeasement of Iran and eliminate the possibility that a genocidal regime would get nuclear weapons, have ballistic missiles and continue to spread terrorism is supported by moderate Muslims who fear Tehran as much, if not more, than the United States and Israel.
A justified fear of Islamists
Americans have good reason to fear the spread of hatred that has become normative in nations where Islamists dominate. That is why immigration and even refugee absorption from such countries is so problematic, because it leads to an influx of people who are largely indoctrinated in beliefs that are antithetical to the values of Western civilization and invariably antisemitic.
Nor, contrary to the Times, is fear of such groups imposing Muslim religious law (Sharia) on other societies unfounded. That is not merely the historical pattern of Islamic communities, but the reality in Western Europe, where the infusion of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa has resulted in authorities fearing to enforce the law at all in some places. This creates an environment in which Islamist hate crimes can be excused or ignored, and those who protest such policies are treated as troublemakers rather than truth-tellers.
More than anything else, the talk of Islamophobia is a stick with which to beat critics of Islamic hate. It is an attempt to silence those who have the temerity to notice the connection between the antisemitic incitement that is commonplace in Islamist discourse in the West and attempts to intimidate Jews and target them for violence. It is no surprise that every time an act of Islamist violence happens, it is now followed by talk of the need to prevent Islamophobia.
The Times commended, in retrospect, President George W. Bush’s almost obsessive fear of offending Muslims during his administration’s “war on terror.” Bush’s insistence that Islam was “a religion of peace” became something of a joke during his presidency. Two decades later, that knee-jerk effort to deny the obvious about Islamist hate and antisemitism is no longer merely risible. It is a deliberate effort to prevent effective action against the Jew-hatred that has surged throughout American society, largely with the assistance of the same media outlets so determined to decry Islamophobia.
The point of contemporary bigotry and bias against Jews is, as author Dara Horn has written, to erase them and work toward a final solution of eliminating Jewish civilization. The focus on Islamophobia is just that. Those who are serious about actually preventing discrimination and hate shouldn’t fall for this big lie.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
