Is ‘Islamophobia’ irrational?

“Phobos” is Greek for “fear.” In modern times, “phobia” has come to mean an irrational fear. Presumably a rational fear is based on a reasonable risk.

Is arachnophobia (fear of spiders) irrational? There are nearly 54,000 species of spider, but only 1% are dangerous to us. So a general phobia of spiders is irrational, but a fear of black widows isn’t. And there is a reason my Australian friends tap their shoes upside down before putting them on — funnel-web spiders like shoes, and they are deadly.

The risk of being a victim of terrorism is small. But if it happens in the West, it’s likely to be by a Muslim with Islamist motives.

The United States and Europe have seen plenty of terrorist attacks and murders by non-Muslims, but for motives that were political, not religious. For Muslim fundamentalists, or “Islamists,” there is no separation between politics and religion.

In this list of suicide bombings from the University of Chicago, the culprits appear to be nearly all Muslims, with motives that are likely jihadist. Muslims, with either premeditated Islamist motives or mental illness or a mix of both, have committed bombings, shootings, stabbings, and vehicle assaults in Europe and the United States.

Here are a few.

Europe

• 2004, Madrid: Terrorists set off bombs in four trains, killing 191 people.
• 2005, London: Four suicide bombers killed 52 people on three Underground trains and one bus.
• 2015, Paris: Coordinated suicide attacks killed 130 people, notably at the Bataclan theater.
• 2016, Brussels: Suicide bombers killed 34 people at the Zaventem Airport and a metro station.
• 2016, Nice (France): A man drove a truck through a seaside promenade, killing 86 people.
• 2017, England: Suicide bombers killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.
• 2024, Germany: A man stabbed and killed three people and wounded more.

The United States

• 2009, Fort Hood: A U.S. Army major shot and killed 13 people and wounded 30.
• 2013, Boston: Tsarnaev brothers killed three people and wounded hundreds with bombs.
• 2015, Chattanooga: A man killed five people at a military recruiting center.
• 2015, San Bernardino: A couple shot and killed 14 people and wounded 22.
• 2016, Orlando: A man shot and killed 49 people and wounded 53 at the Pulse Nightclub.

The risk of being a victim of terrorism is small. But if it happens in the West, it’s likely to be by a Muslim with Islamist motives. Our educators, media, and politicians would pretend otherwise.

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The Daily Telegraph reports that in Britain, many of those too young to remember it are “barely aware of the context and the details of the [9/11 terrorist] plot.” Schoolteachers don’t teach the plain truth to avoid offending parents, allowing absurd conspiracy theories to take root — such as that the United States or Israel blew the Twin Towers up as a pretext to launch a war in the Middle East.

In a 2016 poll of 3,000 British Muslims, 31% thought the United States was behind 9/11. Seven percent said it was “the Jews,” and only 4% blamed al-Qaeda or Muslim terrorists. In America, no one 30 or older can ever forget what happened. But some of these students interviewed by Young Americas Foundation are unaware of who carried out the attacks and why.

True, most American youth are ignorant of all history due to abysmal K-12 education standards. Sometimes popular culture fills the gap. There are hundreds of movies, from “Apocalypse Now” to “Platoon,” about Vietnam. There are thousands about World War II.

But for 9/11, very few. An ABC miniseries, “The Path to 9/11,” was shown once in 2006 and never again. It’s not available to stream, though I found a DVD on Amazon and a blurry YouTube bootleg.

In the U.S., any criticism of Islamism is quickly labeled “Islamophobia” by groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations. But there is no official, government-endorsed definition of that term. Americans’ free speech is protected by the First Amendment to our Constitution, but Britain and many other countries have only limited protection.

In Britain, the Labour government downplays Islamic extremism for fear of offending the Muslim votes it depends on.

The British government created a Working Group on Anti-Muslim Hatred to define “Islamophobia,” but they deleted all the comments and contributions by outside groups to the effort. Why? Critics allege that they would show Islamists were influencing the new definition, which could one day result in prosecutions. One Conservative member of Parliament warned the government that “there is a serious risk that this definition could lead to limitations on freedom of speech, criminalize language and prevent the discussion of religious ideas — creating a de facto blasphemy law.”

But of course, there already is a de facto blasphemy law all over Europe — with the possible penalty being death.

Written Islamic religious tradition prohibits depicting the Muslims' prophet. In 2005, the Danish magazine Jyllands-Posten published cartoons that did so. Ambassadors from 11 Muslim-majority countries, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the Arab League all protested to the Danish government. Street protests took place in Denmark, Australia, Canada, the U.K., the United States, and elsewhere.

Danish Muslim groups (unsuccessfully) tried to get the magazine prosecuted for blasphemy.

That year, the clear political cost of crossing Islamist red lines was made clear all over the West. Soon enough, so was the physical cost.

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In 2006, the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo put a cartoon of the Muslim prophet Muhammad on its cover and reprinted the Danish cartoons along with new ones. In 2015, Islamist terrorists killed eight journalists and staff and two police officers at the magazine's offices in Paris.

In 2020, French teacher Samuel Paty was killed and beheaded by an Islamist fanatic because he had used a cartoon from Charlie Hebdo in teaching a class on free speech.

In 2021, a teacher in England used one of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons to illustrate a lesson on free speech and blasphemy. Doxxed and threatened with death, he went into hiding and is still under police protection. The school suspended the teacher and apologized.

Salman Rushdie wrote “The Satanic Verses” in 1988. A year later, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini put out a fatwa (religious decree) ordering all Muslims to kill him and anyone involved with the book’s publication. Italian and Japanese translators of the book, and its Norwegian publisher, were stabbed by assailants in the following years.

Rushdie was protected by the British government at great expense. But in August 2022, while giving a talk in upstate New York, he was stabbed and nearly killed by Hadi Matar, a Muslim attempting to carry out the 35-year-old fatwa.

To have a fear of all Muslims may not be rational, but to have a fear of Islamism surely is. Trying to define Islamophobia so broadly as to limit free speech — and then ban it under threat of fines or prison — doesn’t make that reality go away.

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