Islamophobia and the
elephant in the room …
By Jamal Kanj*
March 18, 2019
Were you surprised by
Masjid al Noor massacre in Christchurch, New Zeeland? If your answer is yes, I
would like to be the first to welcome you to our planet earth. According to FBI
records, hate crimes against Muslims have increased by as much as five folds
since 2001.
The massacre in New
Zealand, or the murders of shop-owners (some were Indian Sikhs suspected of
being Muslims) and mosque bombings in the US, or Quebec City mosque massacre
and the London van ramming into a crowd of worshippers in 2017. To name just few,
these were not abstract singular events, but the outcome of organized virulent
campaigns to demonize Muslims in the West.
It is impossible to
have constructive discourse on Islamophobia absent of confronting the elephant
in the room: Islamophobia is the creation of an unholy alliance between
political Zionism and neocons in the West. The depraved alliance made it easy
for Islamophobes to normalize Muslim hate and castigate Islam as “radical”
religion.
In America, the recent coordinated
malicious attacks on Muslim US Congresswoman, Ilhan Omar for questioning
Israeli hold on US elected officials, are inseparable from the Islamophobic cultural
onslaught vilifying followers of the “demonized” religion and dismissing their
views as irreverent and out of touch.
Hordes of Islamophobe predators
cast slanderous aspersions on Congresswoman Omar as Anti-Sematic for expressing
views on the nation of Israel. The defamatory blackmail label intentionally
conflates Anti-Jewish racists—who are for the most part allies of political
Zionism—with those who justly criticize the Netanyahu Jewish apartheid regime
in Israel.
Throughout the years, political
Zionism has successfully perfected this intellectual terrorism tool to silence
critique of Israel. Sadly, the same is blindly mimicked by most Jewish leaders,
media outlets and Islamophobes to stifle any rational debate on Israel.
It is not mere coincidence
that the exact same phrase “radical Islam” is parroted across four continents: Benjamin
Netanyahu in Israel, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, John Hagabee in the US, Scott Morrison and Fraser Anning in
Australia, Tommy Robinson and Gerard Batten in UK.
Defying centuries old
trends to regionalize the English language, it’s most likely that globalizing
the same Islamophobic locutions is part of a cheat sheet to debase Islam and hence,
promote Islamophobia. Especially since all these pundits have one thing in
common, besides uniting an English lexicon, they’re staunch supporters of
Israel and political Zionism.
Neocons and political
Zionism mantras like “radical Islam” are fodders for Islamophobia in the West. It
blames the belief system of more than one billion human beings for the actions
of relatively small number of individuals, although this only applies to Muslims.
It’s certain that
Benton Tarrant massacre will not be attributed to “radical Christianity.” As no
one had implicated “radical Judaism” on the celebrated Jewish terrorist Brauch
Goldstein—who used an Israeli army supplied automatic rifle to massacre 29
Palestinian worshipers in 1994. And his tomb became a religious shrine with a
plaque that read "To the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the
Jewish people, the Torah, and the nation of Israel".
Owning to their shared Islamophobic
values, anti-Muslim pundits have cultivated unique relationship with Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As with his allies in the West, Netanyahu
has just entered into unholy alliance with Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of “Jewish
Power”―the Israeli Jewish version of the KKK.
Typical of tribal hate,
Gvir calls Christians “bloodsucking vampires” and displays a photo in his room
of the Jewish copy of the Christchurch terrorist. Gvir, the decedent of a
Kurdish immigrant advocates the ethnic cleansing of non-Jewish Native
Palestinians from villages and homes their existence predated Gvir’s birth, and
certainly before his father immigrated to Palestine and the creation of the
state of Israel.
Israeli racist Jewish politics
had drifted too far, prominent Jewish and international Linguist and Scholar
Noam Chomsky has recently reminded us of decades old concerns expressed by
renowned Israeli biochemist and polymath, Yeshayahu Leibowitz who described
Israeli occupation of Palestinian land as “Judeo-Nazi” in nature. Leibowitz had
cautioned his compatriots of the danger in making Israel and Zionism more sacred than
Jewish humanist values.
The onus is therefore on
mainstream Jewish organizations to make sure “Jewish humanist values” are not defined
by Israeli Prime Minister alliance with the Jewish version of the KKK, or with
Netanyahu’s Islamophobe allies in the likes of Trump, Morrison, Cruz, Hagabee,
Huckabee, Batten …etc.
Mainstream Jewish leaders
must stop abusing the “Anti-Semitic” cry to stifle legitimate political debate
on Israel’s version of the KKK, or to defend the unholy alliance between
political Zionism and Islamophobes in the West.
Else, they risk making
the Anti-Semitic label as hollow as the gun barrel that massacred 51 Muslim worshipers
in New Zealand.
*Mr Kanj (www.jamalkanj.com) an author who had written weekly
newspaper column and publishes on several websites on Arab world issues. He is
the author of “Children of Catastrophe,” Journey from a Palestinian Refugee
Camp to America. His recent coauthored book “Bride of the Sea” was published in
Germany and Poland. This Op-Ed piece can be published with the author’s
permission.