The dangerous drive to correlate Islamophobia with anti-Semitism
by Melanie Phillips:
Islamophobia, like much Muslim discourse, is based on an appropriation and inversion of Jewish experience and precepts.
The Somali-born congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who has made a number of anti-Semitic remarks, is currently embroiled in controversy over her marriage history. When claims against her of bigamy and immigration fraud first emerged in 2016, Omar accused the journalists involved of “Islamophobia.”
Omar has also made a claim being heard more and more: that Muslims are called anti-Semites only because they are Muslim. In other words, anyone who calls out Muslim anti-Semitism is Islamophobic.
This twisted claim is a way of making Muslim anti-Semitism unsayable.
The claim is being heard alongside the message that Islamophobia is the equivalent of anti-Semitism—an equation made by the leadership of Britain’s Jewish community as well. This is dismaying because it’s a morally bankrupt and dangerous equivalence.
While some people are truly prejudiced against Muslims—just as some hate or fear anyone not like themselves—Islamophobia was invented by the Muslim Brotherhood as a way of silencing legitimate discussion of any fault in the Islamic world.
A relentless campaign is currently being waged to outlaw Islamophobia in the West—and thereby shut down that vital discussion. The United Nations is working with the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to prohibit all speech that Muslims consider offensive.
A few days ago, Pakistan ramped up the pressure. Backing the U.N.’s initiative, Pakistan’s ambassador Maleeha Lodhi said Islamophobia was “today the most prevalent expression of racism and hatred against ‘the other.’ ”
This is totally untrue. Apart from the fact that Islam is not a race but a religion, the true hatred of “the other” that really is most prevalent today is anti-Semitism. And those principally spreading this poison are the political left in tandem with the Muslim world.
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