Mar. 09, 2017
The mainstreaming of Islamophobia and its consequences
In his book “The Islamophobia
Industry,” Nathan Lean, the research director at Georgetown University’s New
Project on Islamophobia, the Bridge Initiative, refers to the group of
Islamophobes as “a right-wing cadre of intellectual hucksters, bloggers,
politicians, pundits, and religious leaders,” who, in the pre-Trump era, when
the book came out (2013), had been working behind the scenes to demonize Islam.
Their relative success at the time was due to the fact that “fear sells.”What’s
happened since then is that Islamophobes have filled senior positions in the
Trump administration, and many became their official or unofficial advisers. As
a result, a dark and dismal view of Islam and Muslims became a central concept
in decision-making at the highest levels and, at the societal level,
Islamophobia is slowly becoming a new normal, leading to a surge in anti-Muslim
hate crimes.
The chief Islamophobe in this
administration is, undoubtedly, Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and
senior counselor, who is also permanent member of the National Security
Council. Bannon, who is dubbed in Washington “Trump’s brain,” was the head of
Breitbart News, an internet site that he turned into a forum for the white
supremacist, anti-immigration, “Alt-Right” movement. The movement’s motto is
“Let’s Make America White Again,” so it is not only anti-Islam, it also targets
other minorities, such as blacks, Latinos and others.
Bannon views the world in terms of a
clash between the Judeo-Christian World and Islam. What alarms him most is that
the West is weakening itself by creating unions, such as the European Union,
where strong nationalist states are withering inside them, and where the idea
of multiculturalism is gaining dominance. At a meeting in the Vatican in 2014,
he described the “War” with Islam in Europe and declared: “To be brutally
frank, Christianity is dying in Europe and Islam is on the rise.”
Bannon played at one time the role
of a movie director, to little success. One of his proposed productions in 2007
was a three-part movie under the title “Destroying the Great Satan: The Rise of
Islamic Facism (sic) in America.” The opening scene of the movie script was
described by the Washington Post in the following terms: “The flag fluttering
above the U.S. Capitol is emblazoned with a crescent and star. Chants of
‘Allahu Akbar’ rise from the inside of the building. On the screen in bold
letters: ‘Islamic State of America.’” The film, which was never produced,
speaks of a fifth column in the U.S. made up of Islamic front groups who are
the enablers paving “the road to this unique hell on earth.”
Helping Bannon with his Islamophobic
agenda are a number of senior appointees in the Trump administration: One of
those is Stephen Miller, White House senior adviser, co-author with Bannon of
the first ill-fated Executive Order banning citizens of seven Muslim majority
countries from entering the United Sates (A new order was just signed but will
also be challenged in the courts). Miller has been an Islamophobe since high
school where, according to the Washington Post, he once wrote a column in the
school newspaper titled “A Time to Kill,” urging a violent response to radical
Islamists. The nominee for Secretary of Housing, Ben Carson, is another member
of the Trump team who has made Islamophobic statements. Muslims could embrace
American Democracy, he said, “Only if they are schizophrenic ... because they
have two different philosophies boring at you.” He also believes, according to
the newspaper the Independent, “that there is a Muslim plot to take over
America, called ‘civilizational Jihad.’” The Independent says that the Trump
administration already has seven people who have expressed Islamophobic
sentiment, and 12 more potential appointees who have openly made anti-Muslim
statements. One must add to these, the scores of assistants and regular staff
that have been recruited by the above senior officials.
As important perhaps is the army of
Islamophobes who have earned the respect of Bannon and who act as his
intellectual support group of activists outside the administration. At the top
of the list, in terms of widespread activist influence, is Brigitte Gabriel
(née Hanan Qahwaji), a Lebanese American from Marjayoun. Gabriel made a career
based on her unlikely life story in that town during the first eight years of
the Lebanese war. She claims to have lived with her parents, during this
period, in a cramped underground bomb shelter eating grass and dandelions. “To
get some water, we would crawl under [Muslim] snipers’ bullets to a nearby
spring.” The family was finally rescued, she says, by the Israelis when they
invaded Lebanon in 1982. Michael Young, senior editor at the Carnegie Middle
East Center, called her stories a “con act.”
Gabriel migrated to the U.S. through
Israel and established a political group, ACT for America, which she claims has
300,000 members. She is now making a career sowing fear of Islam. Among her
statements: “Islamic terrorists “are ... doing exactly what the Quran teaches.”
“Every practicing Muslim is a radical Muslim.” Muslims worship “something they
call ‘Allah’ which is very different from the God we [Christians] believe in.”
“America and the West are doomed to failure in this war unless they stand up
and identify the real enemy: Islam.”
Other supporting activists of Bannon
are Pamela Geller of “Stop Islamization of America,” Robert Spencer of “Jihad
Watch” and Richard Spencer of “Alt-Right.” But the intellectual power in this
cast of characters is undoubtedly Frank Gaffney, the founder of the Center for
Security Policy. In an interview, Gaffney stated that he is less worried about
Al-Qaeda and Daesh (ISIS) than by Muslims in the U.S. praying in mosques and
recruiting at Muslim students associations and other similar groups engaged in
“this stealthy subversive kind of Jihad.” These groups act “like termites,
hollow out the structure of the civil society ... for the purpose of creating
conditions under which the jihad will succeed.” According to his theory of
“civilizational jihad,” American Muslims are secretly trying to take over the
American government.
This official attitude against Islam
has affected not only public policy, but also attitudes of the common people. A
2016 study by the University of Minnesota found that the disapproval rate of
Muslims has doubled, from 26 percent a decade earlier to 46 percent, making
Muslims the most disliked group in the country. This was bound to be reflected
in a spike in the hate crimes against American Muslims. According to the FBI,
hate crimes against Muslims rose 78 percent during 2015, the first year of the
presidential campaign. While official FBI data for 2016 have not been released
yet, private observations seem to indicate another surge in anti-Muslim hate
crimes last year. Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate
and Extremism at University of California at San Bernardino, told the New York
Times last September that there was another spike in hate crimes against
Muslims and that “the rise came even as hate crimes against almost all other
groups ... either declined or increased slightly.” Other experts have confirmed
this finding. Practically all of them blame this rise on the inflammatory rhetoric
of Trump, fed by the chorus of Islamophobes surrounding him.
This mainstreaming of Islamophobia
in the U.S. has also emboldened extremism in much of the Western World, from
Canada to Australia, but it has most directly and dangerously affected Europe.
The desire to return to the nationalist state, away from unions, is on the rise
in France, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and practically all of Eastern Europe,
threatening to dismantle the European Union. It is as if Europe had forgotten
that, in the first half of the 20th century, it was indeed composed of
nationalist states, and had two world wars.
One of the purposes of the European
Union was to avoid such calamities.
Riad Tabbarah is a former ambassador
of Lebanon to the United States.
A version
of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on March 09,
2017, on page 7.
