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When the Tide of Islamophobia Reached My Hometown Mosque

THE Islamic Society of North America’s headquarters sit atop a grassy hill overlooking Plainfield, Ind.

Anti-Muslim hatred in the United States has grown in recent years. The “Ground Zero Mosque” episode in 2010 and successive anti-mosque protests across the country signaled a simmering Islamophobia.

Islamophobic attacks are at an all-time high.

"There's a definite gender issue here at work when it comes to anti-Muslim hate." He says that 80 percent of the attacks after Paris were on women, and that the reasons for this are partly practical. "There's a visibility factor. It's easy to identify Muslim women who dress in Islamic dress. And also there's the fact that they are less likely to fight back."

some of the very worst abuses and pathologies of the Trump presidency represent continuations of our overreaction to 9/11.

He has exacerbated the Islamophobia it helped unleash to an extraordinarily explicit degree

he has politically weaponized the post-9/11 homeland security bureaucracy in just the way its initial critics feared.

French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Mr. Macron’s education minister.

prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture.

Pitted against them is a younger, more diverse guard that considers these theories as tools to understanding the willful blind spots of an increasingly diverse nation that still recoils at the mention of race, has yet to come to terms with its colonial past and often waves away the concerns of minorities as identity politics.

never again is a feeble phrase. The world forgets, just like it has forgotten Bosnia. The nevers have been worn out and abandoned; the again keeps coming back in bigger numbers and darker stories.

The Gaza Strip, already impoverished by occupation and an unlawful 16-year blockade, whose population is made up of 47% children is being carpet-bombed by the most powerful army in the Middle East with the help of the most powerful allies in the world. More than 4,600 Palestinians lie dead and many more face death in the absence of a ceasefire, because they can’t escape bombardment or lack access to water, food or electricity. The Israeli army claims that its offensive, now being stepped up is a “war on terror”; UN experts say it amounts to collective punishment.

These are all facts. Yet even the mention of the word “Palestine” in Germany risks getting you accused of antisemitism. Any attempt at providing context and sharing facts on the historical background to the conflict is seen as crude justification of Hamas’s terror.

Founded in 2013, the AfD isn’t brand new, nor is its provocative, thinly veiled racism and Islamophobia. But over the course of the past five years—and in the face of damning revelations last week about a secret meeting that took place in November—it has radicalized dramatically. The AfD is now more extreme than many fellow far-right parties across Europe, such as the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party, and the Dutch Party for Freedom, among others.

Germany’s foremost expert on the subject, sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer, said the AfD now stands for an “authoritarian national radicalism,” namely, an ideology that propagates a hierarchically ordered, ethnically homogeneous society overseen by a strong-arm state. What’s particularly radical, he said, is the party’s communication with and mobilization of misanthropic groups that rain violence on select minorities

Its victims are refugees, foreign nationals, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.

Many people underreport embarrassing behaviours and thoughts on surveys. They want to look good, even though most surveys are anonymous. This is called social desirability bias.

An important paper in 1950 provided powerful evidence of how surveys can fall victim to such bias. Researchers collected data, from official sources, on the residents of Denver: what percentage of them voted, gave to charity, and owned a library card. They then surveyed the residents to see if the percentages would match. The results were, at the time, shocking. What the residents reported to the surveys was very different from the data the researchers had gathered

Then there’s that odd habit we sometimes have of lying to ourselves. Lying to oneself may explain why so many people say they are above average. How big is this problem? More than 40% of one company’s engineers said they are in the top 5%. More than 90% of college professors say they do above-average work. One-quarter of high school seniors think they are in the top 1% in their ability to get along with other people. If you are deluding yourself, you can’t be honest in a survey.

The video, along with Eric Trump’s claim that his father “literally saved Christianity” and the image Donald Trump reposted on Truth Social of Jesus sitting next to him in court, raises a question:

Does Trump believe that he is God’s messenger, or are his direct and indirect claims to have a special relationship with God a cynical ploy to win evangelical votes?

“Over the years since, there has been a growing chorus of voices saying Trump is the defender of Christians and Christianity. Trump says this himself all the time, ‘When they come after me, they’re really coming after you.’”

We now live in a post-assimilation America. The 50-year-old rules for racial advancement are obsolete. There is no racial barrier left to break. There is no office in the land to which an African-American can ascend — from mayor to attorney general and the presidency — that will serve as a magical platform for saving black people and our nation’s soul from its racist past.

We cannot engineer a more equitable nation simply by dressing up institutions in more shades of brown. Instead, we must confront structural racism and the values of our institutions.

the exceptionalism of Mr. Obama’s biography couldn’t save us from the Tea Party revolution, Republican obstructionism, police brutality, voter suppression and Islamophobia.

In a widely distributed piece written for the magazine The Spectator, which favors leaving the European Union, Alex Massie drew a connection between the “Leave” campaign, which has featured outlandish assertions, xenophobia and Islamophobia, to the death of Ms. Cox.

“Sometimes rhetoric has consequences,” Mr. Massie wrote. “If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river, that their birthright has been pilfered, that their problem is they’re too slow to realize any of this is happening, that their problem is they’re not sufficiently mad as hell, then at some point, in some place, something or someone is going to snap. And then something terrible is going to happen.”

“When you shout BREAKING POINT over and over again, you don’t get to be surprised when someone breaks,” Mr. Massie wrote. “When you present politics as a matter of life and death, as a question of national survival, don’t be surprised if someone takes you at your word. You didn’t make them do it, no, but you didn’t do much to stop it either.”

Why Is Trump Silent on Islamophobic Attacks?

In the ten days following Trump’s victory, the Southern Poverty Law Center chronicled one hundred attacks—or threatened attacks—against American Jews and 49 against American Muslims.

the period between election day and February 9, the liberal blog Think Progress counted 70 anti-Jewish incidents and 31 anti-Muslim ones.

“That’s not who we are.” So said President Obama, again and again throughout his administration, in speeches urging Americans to side with him against the various outrages perpetrated by Republicans.

If close to half of America voted for Republicans in the Obama years and support Trump today, then clearly something besides the pieties of cosmopolitan liberalism is very much a part of who we are.

This self-undermining flaw makes the trope a useful way to grasp the dilemmas facing Trump’s opponents. In seeking to reject Trump’s chauvinist vision, they end up excluding too much of what a unifying counternarrative would require.

at what time in American history have particular groups not been the subject of bigotry?

Unfortunately, contemporary Islamophobia is not a stain against the otherwise spotless canvas of American history. If anything, that canvas is filthy and should be acknowledged as such.

Rather than viewing the “shameful interning of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the disgraceful refusal to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe” as rare, exceptional tests in American history, we need to view those events as constitutive elements of the American experience. Was America not American prior to the abolishing of slavery? Was America not American prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, during the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the Zoot Suit Riots, or the pursuit of Manifest Destiny? Anti-miscegenation laws were belatedly toppled in the ’60s, but today 37% of Americans would not approve of a family member marrying outside of his or her race. Are those people not American?

Obama plans to herald the contributions of Muslims to American society while issuing a forceful counterpoint to the language favored by some Republican presidential candidates like Donald Trump, according to White House officials.

We've seen an alarming willingness on the part of some Republicans to try to marginalize law-abiding, patriotic Muslim Americans,"

Obama has visited mosques in the past, but never inside the United States, which is home to 2.75 million Muslims, according to the Pew Research Center

Growing up in the Bronx, she was unaware of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and was mostly insulated from the surge in suspicion that engulfed Muslims in the United States, the programs of police surveillance and the rise in bias attacks.

her emergence from childhood into young womanhood has coincided with the violent spread of the Islamic State and a surge in Islamophobia,

had to confront some harsh challenges of being a young Muslim in America.

Kristallnacht was a turning point on the path to the concentration camps and the Holocaust, at the end of which 6 million Jews would be killed

much of the current level of Islamophobia appears justified to many Americans because of the terrible and tragic killings by Muslims in San Bernardino and Paris.

Trump has taken the first tiny dangerous steps towards unleashing forces that could trigger large-scale violence against the Muslim community.

Parents were upset over a geography assignment on world religions from teacher Cheryl LaPorte, who had students practice calligraphy by writing the Muslim statement of faith, which translates to "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah," according to Staunton, Virginia, paper the News Leader. Students were also shown a copy of the Quran, according to the News Leader

Augusta County Superintendent Eric Bond said a statement to the News Leader that the Arabic message was not translated and that LaPorte did not ask students to "translate it, recite it or otherwise adopt or pronounce it as a personal belief."

"The students were presented with the statement to demonstrate the complex artistry of the written language used in the Middle East, and were asked to attempt to copy it in order to give the students an idea of the artistic complexity of the calligraphy," Bond said.

The difference is that liberals protect people, and P.C. people protect feelings. They don’t do anything. They’re pointing at other people who are somehow falling short of their standards, which could have changed three weeks ago

when I was growing up, the most liberal thing you could do is not see color. Well, that’s wrong now. You see color, always, so you can register your white privilege. But I grew up in the Martin Luther King era: Judge by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. I still think that’s the best way to do it. Not see it.

If someone walks in the room, after a minute, I should not be thinking about color. And I am not. That’s how I have always been. I have actual black friends. I don’t think they want me to be always thinking: Black person. Black person.