The Islamophobia Thread

Islamophobia is a term for prejudice against, hatred towards, or fear of the religion of Islam, Muslims, or of ethnic groups perceived to be Muslim. The term entered into common English usage in 1997 with the publication of a report by the Runnymede Trust condemning negative emotions such as fear, hatred, and dread directed at Islam or Muslims. While the term is now widely recognized and used, both the term and the underlying concept have been criticized.

The causes and characteristics of Islamophobia are still debated. Some scholars have defined it as a type of racism. Some commentators have posited an increase in Islamophobia resulting from the September 11 attacks, while others have associated it with the increased presence of Muslims in secular nations.

First off, they talked about the problem at an institutional level.

In their efforts against terrorism, the police and intelligence services have been doing something rather iffy: they've focused their prevention efforts on sleeper cells. That is to say, they arrested people who had done nothing, and had no weapons or explosives, but were suspected of this or that, because of their acquaintances and family relations, because of their sympathies. They were accused of talking in code. Like saying "I'm going to get married" for "I'm gonna go martyr myself"—which is a rather hilarious choice, come to think of it.

This is nothing new in terms of the government chasing after people with outlier ideologies. Just ask any counter-culture activists far left or right of centre. The conference speakers implied that much more effort was dedicated to go after (and publicize) people who killed on ideological grounds, than people who killed for money or business reasons, be it organized crime or unscrupulous corporations. As a caricaturist wrote: "Killing for religious motives is barbaric. What's civilized is killing for economic motives."◊

A common pattern nowadays is to sweep in through bars and restaurants in a whole neighborhood, demand ID documentation from everyone, arrest anyone who can't or won't produce it... and not without brutality. They will gratuitously employ extreme subduction protocols. A man died because six police piled up on him, allegedly to restraim him from hurting itself. The autopsy showed no self-harm wounds... and plenty of blows to the head. The judge dismissed all the evidence from the autopsy and all the testimonies as "unimportant", and the policemen were absolved and released. That struggle to get justice still going on, because the guy happened to have family and friends who cared, and they've managed to spark a campaign.

They went on to insist that it was easier to guarantee an effective police action if we focus on protecting citizens rather than on persecuting people for what they think.

Islamophobia would be an update of racism, following the same rationalization processes of sweeping generalization and stigmatization of an entire collective (one Muslim is a terrorist, all Muslims are terrorists). It would be a case of scapegoating, of distracting from the grave internal social and political problems by seeking a "whipping boy".

The problem starts with school segregation. For one thing, the dual system of public school and subsidized private schools means that immigrants kids get excluded from one system and shunted and concentrated into the other, which results in ghettos of sorts. There's also the matter of the lack of representation at school of Muslim history, customs, celebrations. They send the kids on school visits to churches, even synagogues, but never to mosques. Such as they are, that is; there's a great deal of institutional resistance to granting Muslims permits to erect proper temples, despite the fact that the law grants them equal rights to Christians in that regard, on paper. Hence, most communities get stuck having to pray inside dingy garages.

Kids should be taught about their neighbours; familiar children grow into tolerant and understanding adults. Ignorant children, or children who learn about Islam from the media... but we'll return to the media later.

There's a linguistic trap, a reticence to accept that Islam is "ours", that it is home-grown, not something foreign, not something weird, but something domestic and local.

The Royal Academy of the Spanish Language is the institution that is allegedly tasked with recording the words of the Spanish language as they are "effectively used". Their Dictionary of the Spanish language shows some interesting tendencies on their side. On the one hand, archaisms from the XVI-th century like "alfalá" or "mulsime" that no-one uses except scholars are still featured. On the other hand, an everyday, essential word like Sunni was only added in 2014, while Atatolá was added much earlier, in 1984 (and still shi'a is not featured). This reflects a tendency where we only seem to hear or care about Muslims when they're involved in something violent and flashy. The word "islamofobia" isn't featured. Apparently, it's not in effective use.

The next speaker was a journalist, and according to him, in general, the media tend to prevaricate and misrepresent: we get pundits who know very little but who are very bold in putting forth their opinions. Very few Muslims are ever invited, interviewed, or sought out as sources: it's always when there's an attack or a war of some sort, and they tend to ask religious authorities rather than simple citizens. Furthermore, there's plenty of experts on the topic of Islam, plenty of solid sources, but they don't bother to contact them in normal times, and so, when something happens, they know no-one, grab the first "expert" at hand, who might know even less than them!

He also suggested that there was too much of a tendency to pile on adjectives and labels, like "radical muslim", "jihadist", and so on. He suggests that blind, murderous terrorist strikes be simply labelled murders or killings, without attaching labels and adjectives to it, especially when the terrorists haven't made any clear claims, demands, assertions, grievances, when it isn't clear what the Hell they even want.

One thing that the media tend to forget is that Muslims are the first victims of Islamic terorism. That, the day of the Charlie attacks, hundreds were dying at the hands of ISIS and Boko Haram and others like them.

They don't treat Islam as a fact that is pertaining to their own country. They treat it like it was some kind of nationality. Like "Islamland" is a place somewhere where all these people belong, instead of here. People came from the world over to join this society. How about inviting them on the plateau from a stance of normality, on a normal day, to talk about their normal lives? How about asking a common citizen about their experience, instead of a religious official, every now and then? How about acknowledging and owning the current plurality of the culture?

There's a movement throughout Europe that Spain is beginning to join: this "European Patriotism" against "the Islamisation of Europe".

This is about status, about marking a distance between "true Europeans" and "the Other", between "Natives" and "Newcomers". Like racism, it is a distinction mechanism.

Islamophobia functions as an "acceptable racism".

What about these Muslims, then? Some of them have been living here for forty years, and haven't abandoned their faiths. Thus we move from threat to suspicion. Thoughts of a "Fifth Column" and "Double Allegiance" float around. And every time there's some incident, it feels like Groundhog Day. In Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11 (Themes for the 21st Century Ser.), Richard J. Bernstein studies this deformation of thought where nuance becomes conflated with weakness and indecision.

Another speaker brought up the interesting case of the headscarf. Muslim girls who choose to wear their faith out in public are excluded from schools, women get looked down upon, randomly interrogated about their beliefs in public areas, even insulted. That crap doesn't happen to, say, males wearing a djellaba, because it's easier to bully a woman, apparently. The popular assumption is that they are willing victims, accomplices and enablers of the evil males. Which is rather insulting, really.

An interesting observation is that there's very little research on the role of immigrant mothers; they are made invisible, even though they play a major role, at home, with the children. The kids see the news, they get asked stuff (told stuff) at school, and they come home and ask their moms "Islamic? Terrorism? Mom, what's up with this and that?" And the moms have to answer. The speaker concluded: "My daughter told me, 'What that pundit on TV's saying, that's all wrong, that's slander, why isn't anyone talking back to her?' and I answered "Well, daughter of mine, how about you study very hard, make yourself a woman of culture and standing, and then one day go on that plateau and tell them what the truth is?"

[/conference]

“Students shall not participate in religious activities; they shall not study scripts or read poems at script and choir classes; they shall not wear any religious emblems; and no parent or others can force students to have religious beliefs or partake in religious activities.”

The ruling party is wary of religious activities it worries might serve as a rallying point for opposition to one-party rule. Controls on worship are especially sensitive in Xinjiang and in neighboring Tibet, where religious faith plays a large role in local cultures.

The ruling party says religion and education should be kept separate and students should not be subject to religious influences. That rule is rarely enforced for children of Han Chinese, who, if they have a religion, are mostly Buddhist, Daoist or Christian.

You can't have flashbacks if you weren't there, Handle.

Since 9/11, the U.S. government has implemented policies that target members of these communities, reinforcing the notion that they are worthy of suspicion. George W. Bush’s administration, for example, required people from South Asian and Middle Eastern countries to register with immigration authorities, detaining and deporting nearly 13,000 of them. Under President Barack Obama, the Federal Bureau of Investigation continues to engage in pointed surveillance of and information gathering in Muslim communities, as do local authorities such as the New York Police Department. Recently, the DOJ released guidance barring profiling by federal law enforcement but carved out exceptions in cases of national security and racial mapping, which allows authorities to gather information about particular communities for intelligence purposes. And just this week, the White House convened a national summit to discuss programs to counter violent extremism in the U.S. Instead of addressing all forms of violent extremism — including the threat from, say, white supremacist groups — the summit and programs’ framework broadly focused on Muslim radicalization, reinforcing the narrative that American Muslims are inherently suspect.

The media, public and political figures and a growing Islamophobia industry buoy this climate of suspicion. In January one organization placed anti-Muslim ads on Muni buses in San Francisco. Vanderbilt University law professor Carol Swain’s op-ed in The Tennessean stirred outrage among students on campus when she asked, “What horrendous attack would finally convince us that Islam is not like other religions in the United States, that it poses an absolute danger to us and our children unless it is monitored better than it has been under the Obama administration?” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal recently made comments about “no-go zones” in Europe that are purportedly under Muslim control. And in Texas, protesters shouted, “Go home! ISIS will gladly take you!” at a group of Muslims visiting the state Capitol to meet with their legislators.

Legal efforts will be only partly effective if we do not confront the culture that allows hate violence to chafe and fester. All these incidents occurred in the two months leading up to the Chapel Hill shootings. The cumulative effect is overwhelming. In the week after the tragedy, communities around the country have reported other acts of violence and vandalism. Someone spray-painted racial slurs such as “pigs” and “Now this is a hate crime” on the doors of the Islamic School of Rhode Island. In Dearborn, Michigan, police are investigating two white men’s assault of an Arab man who was with his daughter in the parking lot of a Kroger grocery store. In Bothell, Washington, leaders of a Hindu temple found a swastika and “Get out” spray-painted on a wall, and a nearby junior high school was vandalized with “Muslims get out.”

It will backfire nastily on them though; authoritarianism is like kryptonite to multinational and multicultural states.