Don’t you dare call us Islamophobes or Racist

By Patrick Hall

I was buying my morning bagel and coffee over in the university student union building; when I caught on a nearby television monitor the horrific events that occurred on 9/11.  Like most Americans, I went through the natural emotions of fear and utter disbelief.  But I also remember that within the same hour, anger flooded my sensory response.  As I returned to my office in the library, I ran into a colleague, who was also trying to deal with the rapidly unfolding events of Sept 11th. However, his response was quite different from mine and probably most normal, Patriotic Americans. You know, those of us who like our Country and don’t see it as systemically racist, misogynist, sexist, Islamophobic, and just a plain awful place. His single concern was not with the 3000 men, women, and children who were crushed and melted when the Twin Towers collapsed.  Like many liberal progressives (i.e., Democrats), that dominate academia, he was troubled that this attack would bring on a backlash against Muslims in the country similar to what led to the internment of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor.  The backlash never happened.

With the recent slaughter by Hamas of over 1400 Israeli citizens, along with the corresponding Mea culpa reaction from liberal progressives, and their radical Islamic sympathizers, it hit me that too many Americans fear being called Islamophobic or racist, over the very real possibility of being killed by some xenophobic religious nut-job. Liberal Progressives and the cultural left will immediately default to kill me, but don’t call me a racist!  Kill me, but don’t call me Islamophobic!  Kill me, but don’t call me “whatever” the political left and the gods of woke,¹ over the past three decades deem culturally insensitive.

I am married to a native-born German, and we spend a portion of our retirement visiting grandchildren and relatives in Europe.  Since the influx of over a million Turkish (mostly Muslim) and other refugees admitted to Germany by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the ruling elite, any dissent by the everyday German citizen was met with the charge that you’re a Nazi. Like most Germans, they are anxious that a percentage of these newly arrived and not so “newly arrived immigrants” have at best a lukewarm allegiance to Germany. Do they harbor apocryphal alliances, much of it “commissional” within the various factions that encompass radical Islamists?  People who mean to inflict great harm on Western culture, if or when, given the opportunity.  Judging from Pro Hamas demonstrations taking place in the United States and the EU, these are valid concerns.  Decades ago, Middle Eastern Scholar Daniel Pipes stated without apology, that there are influential constituencies’, of what Dr. Pipes identifies as the “violent and pre-violent” wing of Islam. It has little or nothing to do with the made-up two-state solution.  Two-state solution is a well-hone lie, we in the West have been telling ourselves for over seventy years. Hamas and many of their compadres simply want the total extinction of Israel and Western cultures reduced (if they are successful) to a Jizya or Dhimmis status.²    Pipes and other Middle Eastern scholars like Robert Spencer understand that Islamists see Western societies as not just alien but hostile. Hamas, Hezbollah, et al, despise the West and Israel not just for what it does, but for what it is. The intolerant and polarizing aspects (or faith-statement) of fundamentalist Islam need to be challenged. However, the Western political class and their academia are tragically misguided. Much of which is deliberate.  From Barrack Obama to Joe Biden, to the EU polity of Brussels, they all suffer from the same reductionist and postmodern practice of stuffing the complexities of political science, Middle Eastern History, and governance into bottles labeled Western Colonial oppression, white racism, Israeli apartheid state, and reflexive Islamophobia.

 It receives its genesis and is nurtured in Western cultures primarily by therapeutic self-loathing. It is a self-loathing that makes our jihadist enemies the victims of Western historical depredation, abetted Israel.  Do any of us remember Barrack Obama's cringing flattery of Islam during his 2009 Cairo speech? There he repeated the “old saw-horse” of Western Colonialism and Israel's oppression of the Palestinians as the progenitor of the discord in the Middle East.  As a sidebar, it was curious that Obama neglected to point out that Islam created one of history’s greatest (and at times exploitive and brutal) colonial empires of the Ottomans. Subsequently, over the past 90-plus years since the end of the Ottomans, Muslim nations were paid billions of dollars in foreign aid to later align with the United States and their Western allies. Although looking at the current state of Western/Islamic relations, gratitude seems to be anathema within the DNA of some Muslim nations.
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1. Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and LGBT rights. To put it simply, every damn thing can be interpreted (mostly by Progressive Liberal Democrats and their cultural left) as racist or Islamophobic.
 2.  Jizya is a per capita yearly taxation historically levied in the form of financial charge on dhimmis, that is, permanent non-Muslim subjects of a state governed by Islamic law. The Quran and Hadiths mention jizya without specifying its rate or amount, and the application of jizya varied in the course of Islamic history.