If you are a regular viewer of Reductio, you must have seen us discussing about Islamophobia earlier in one of our live videos.
Post that, we had an episode of Simple Neat and Wrong series where, Rajesh speaks about islamophobia
You can check Human rights councils working definition of Islamophobia for a detailed definition.
Briefly, Islamophobia is about having a hostile attitude towards Muslims. It also includes an attitude where Islamic culture or Muslims are labeled as inferior or primitive.
Thanks to the so called “Woke Mind Virus”, people have started calling out Islamophobia more frequent than ever. With growing number of criticisms, Islamophobes were forced to devise a defense strategy against the accusations
Islamophobic individuals typically respond in one of two ways when confronted about their Islamophobic remarks.
1. Denying Islamophobia.
What is the most common way by which you try to justify a crime ? You either deny the crime or challenge the legitimacy of labeling it as a crime.
Yes that’s what some of the Islamophobes choose to do. There are multiple arguments which they try to show to deny the crime.
“This is not the right word”
They might start by questioning the legitimacy of the word . They typically engage in an etymological fallacy. They argue that Islamophobia means irrational fear towards Islam. They claim what they have is not an irrational fear but a rational fear. Hence, they conclude that the word is meaningless. You can check the video by Rajesh explaining why it is BS.
Instead of addressing the phenomena what the word signifies, they will try to engage in a war with semantics. The interesting part is you will not see them engaging in similar semantic wars. They do not debate on other words like antisemitism, sexism, racism etc.
“This word is from Hamas/ United nations is Hamas”
Another strategy which they employ to deny islamophobia is again by questioning the legitimacy of the word. The will bring conspiracy theories like “Muslims invented this word to play victimhood”. You will see many new atheists promoting this idea.
Sam Harris once said
What is Islamophobia? Someone once said on the Internet, it’s a word “invented by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons,” and that’s not far from the truth. There is no question that the term has been designed to confuse people. Its purpose is to conflate any criticism of Islam, which is a doctrine of religious beliefs, with bigotry against Muslims as people. In fact, it equates secularism itself—the commitment to keeping religion out of our laws and public policy—with hatred. The term is now being widely used in the mainstream media, and it is making it impossible to speak honestly about the consequences of dangerous ideas.
Or they might just say that the organizations which coined this word is basically working for Islamic terrorists.
“But we do vaccinate dogs”
Another option available for the Islamophobes to deny Islamophobia is to compare Muslims or Islam with subhuman or animals. Like once I heard a self proclaimed science communicator comparing Muslims with dogs .He compared the need to monitor Muslims to how dogs are regularly vaccinated to prevent rabies.
In such narratives, Muslims are denied human status. You could see transphobes frequently using similar arguments by comparing transgenders with viruses, dogs, pigs etc. So in this strategy – if you are a Muslim, you are from a subhuman species and hence the prejudice doesn’t exist as we don’t have prejudice against dogs and pigs.
“Diseases need to be contained”
Another way by which Islamophobes deny islamophobia is by categorizing Muslims as a disease.
Just like how Elon musk and his team pathologized people into “Woke mind virus” , you will see Muslims being treated as people with mental disorders that needs immediate treatment. You will hear arguments like Islam is a like a virus that can affect a good human and turn him to do the unthinkable.
All these narratives try to show Muslims as subhuman or suffering from a disease
“people who are rendered sufficiently unintelligible by their society are in severe
danger of not being left alone to do as they please”-What even is Gender. R.R Briggs and B.R George
2. Accepting Islamophobia
Second way by which Islamophobes respond is by accepting the crime. They accept the fact that there is Islamophobia but they try to rationalize it. They try to bring in reasons to justify the existence of Islamophobia. Sounds childish – but this is what they do. Their entire argument exists just to convince others that its justified to have prejudice against Muslims.
“It is because of them”
Many of the times, I come across these statements that starts with
“Yes Islamophobia is there but it is because of the Muslims“
Lets try to put this idea in other scenarios –
“Yes racism exists, but it is because of the black community”
“Yeah sexism exists, but it is because of women”
“Yeah casteism exists, but it is because of Dalits”.
What do such narratives signify ? They signify that people with prejudiced attitudes are not to blame. Instead, they suggest it is the victims who are blameworthy. In short – a new type of victim blaming.
Proponents of such narratives will bring some controversial videos from Islamic public speakers circulated in social media and argue that existence of such people will only increase Islamophobia.
But you won’t see the same attitude for similar videos from religious groups. For other religions the blame is on the individuals but for Muslims, the community should behave itself.
Bad people exists . But for Muslims the bad people are a responsibility of the community to handle.
You also see a benevolent Islamophobia playing out here with statements like
“നിങ്ങൾ കാരണം ഇസ്ലാമിന് ചീത്തപ്പേര് ഉണ്ടാകുന്നു” (You are the reason Islam is getting a bad name)
The Muslim community is given a burden to “fix their mess” so that the privileged people don’t have prejudice towards you.
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