Aslan Reza - Scapegoats: how Islamophobia helps our enemies and threatens our freedoms

Copyright 2016 by Arsalan Iftikhar

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Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-0575-3

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0579-1

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

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Foreword

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By Reza Aslan

A June 2015 front-page article in The New York Times noted that since 9/11 more than twice as many Americans have been killed in acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists than by Islamic extremists. That figure, it should be noted, does not include school shootings, which have tragically become nearly regular episodes in the United States.

It does not include the actions of mass murderers like Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old white supremacist who killed nine African-American worshippers at a historic Charleston, South Carolina, church; or Wade Michael Page, who walked into a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and murdered six worshippers, presumably because he thought they were Muslims. Nor does it include Robert Dear, the Christian zealot who attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, shooting to death a police officer and two others. And it most certainly does not include Bob Doggart, the Christian pastor from Tennessee who was arrested planning a mass slaughter of Muslims in New York.

According to the FBI, more Americans will die because of faulty furniture than at the hands of Islamic terrorists. Your flat-screen television is a greater threat to your life than either ISIS or al-Qaeda. Of course, one would never know any of this based on the words of our politicians and media personalities today. In their view, every Muslim is a closet jihadist just waiting for the opportunity to bring down Western civilization as we know it today.

It is hard to blame the media alone for this phenomenon. After all, the media is in the consumer entertainment business. They actively portray tiny fringe elements within Islam as representative of all Muslims because fear sells their products. And politicians have always benefited from stoking fear and xenophobia, and will continue to do so as long as there is such a thing as politics. Nevertheless, the result of all this fear mongering for votes and profit is that Islamophobia has now become a perfectly accepted form of religious bigotry in Western societies today.

There are, of course, those who insist that there is no such thing as Islamophobia, that it is merely a means of warding off legitimate criticism of Islam. The National Review , the conservative journal, has called Islamophobia a myth. The celebrated anti-theist ideologue Sam Harris likes to say that Islamophobia is a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons. Such arguments are based on a confused combination of tortured semantics and a stubborn refusal to recognize that negative sentiments toward Muslims represent a form of bigotry.

Yet, since bigotry is not a rational response but an emotional onea result of fear, not ignorancethinking of anti-Muslim bigotry as a phobia should then make perfect sense, especially when one is confronted with daily attacks against Muslim individuals, mosques, schools, and cemeteries around the world.

The fact of the matter is that less than half of Americans say they personally know a Muslim and so most people rely on the media to shape their opinions about Islam and Muslims.

That is the problem.

Because as every social scientist knows, it is not data that change peoples minds. What will change peoples minds about disenfranchised groups are human relationships. The more humanized a disenfranchised group becomes to a society, the more difficult it is to demonize that group.

In the meantime, the impact of unfettered Islamophobia is leading many Western societies down a dark path. In Europe, we are witnessing the passage of laws curtailing the rights and freedoms of Muslim communities. We are also witnessing the electoral success of blatantly anti-Muslim political parties, which further leads to a sense of marginalization among Europes diverse Muslim communities. That, in turn, is leading to severe alienation among some of Europes increasingly disenfranchised Muslim youth in the future. This process of turning Muslims into the dangerous outsider only became more intense after the Paris terror attacks in November 2015.

The same kind of Islamophobia that has made much of Europe inhospitable to its Muslim citizens is now threatening to further alienate American Muslims as well. An entire generation of young Muslim kids born here in the United States after 9/11 is now living with the unique experience of facing discrimination under the guise of liberalism and liberation. And the bigotry has only gotten worse over the years, particularly with the vicious rhetoric of the 2016 Republican presidential campaign.

Islamophobia is troubling, but its trajectory in this country is not unique. If we look at statements being made about Muslims in this countrythat they are somehow un-American, that they do not represent American values, that they are foreign, that they are exotic, that they are the quintessential otherwe find the same exact statements being made about Catholic and Jewish people in our recent history as well.

Muslims just happen to be the newest outsider group in this country. Whats more, anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States is very much connected to anti-immigrant sentiment. Even though Muslims came to America as slaves long before the establishment of this country, nearly two-thirds of American Muslims are first-generation immigrants. Yet at the same time, nearly 70 percent of those Muslim immigrants are American citizens. Thats the highest citizenship rate of any immigrant community in America.

If there is a silver lining about the growth of Islamophobia in this country it is that it is reinvigorating our Western societal discourses on the intersection of media, journalism, politics, and faith. That is what makes Scapegoats: How Islamophobia Helps Our Enemies and Threatens Our Freedoms which exhaustively chronicles the narrative history of Islamophobia after September 11such an important book. It should be read by anyone who is interested in correcting the mistakes of our collective past to ensure a brighter shared tomorrow for our future generations.

Dr. Reza Aslan is an internationally acclaimed scholar of religions and author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth and the international best-seller No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam .

Introduction

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Terrorism The word that means nothing, yet justifies everything.

Glenn Greenwald

A s I was preparing to submit my first draft of this book to my publisher, I began to hear breaking news about the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, which ultimately claimed 130 innocent lives. For the next week, I spent all my time running between TV and radio studios here in Washington, D.C., doing interviews with Anderson Cooper on CNN, Chuck Todd and fellow panelist Tom Brokaw on NBCs Meet the Press, on ABC News Nightline and National Public Radio, as well as on overseas networks like Al-Jazeera English (twice in three days) and CCTV, the largest English-language television news network in China. That was just in one week alone.