Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
There is something indecently illiberal about a campaign ostensibly devoted to combating prejudice that begins by demanding people surrender their right to criticize an ideology.
Islamophobia Awareness Month, which is this month, is the exemplar. Its premise sounds reasonable: Prejudice against Muslims is wrong, discrimination is unacceptable, and people should be free to practice their religion without intimidation or harassment. Then comes the sleight of hand.
The campaign does not just seek to combat anti-Muslim bigotry. It promotes the notion that something called “Islamophobia” is a distinct and pervasive social pathology, frequently conflating hostility towards Muslims as people with hostility towards Islam as a system of religious beliefs, doctrines, laws, and some of the worst political ideas ever conceived. That conflation is not accidental; it is the strategy and the entire problem.
And let us not mince words: A real threat of violence backs up the injunctions against criticizing Islam. People are not scared to criticize Christianity or Judaism because Christians and Jews are not going to cut your head off for it the way jihadists do.
Islamophobia, as the term is commonly deployed, is as real as my world record for the 100-meter sprint at the Olympics when I left Usain Bolt in the dust.
Muslims should not be discriminated against, denied employment, assaulted, intimidated, excluded, or treated as second-class citizens because of their religious identity. Mosques should not be vandalized; Muslim women should not be harassed for wearing hijabs; and nobody should have to endure abuse because of their name, appearance, or faith.
Yet none of this requires inventing a special category of intellectual untouchability around Islam. Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism, can be criticized. Their scriptures, institutions, historical conduct, theological contradictions, and political manifestations are legitimate subjects of scrutiny, ridicule, and condemnation. Islam should be no different.
But somehow, in the contemporary lexicon of progressive activism, criticism of Islam is treated as evidence of hostility towards Muslims. Question the doctrine of jihad, the treatment of women under certain interpretations of Sharia, or Islamist movements’ religious justifications, and you risk being branded Islamophobic. It is an intellectually dishonest maneuver that substitutes moral accusation for argument.
The word itself is problematic. A phobia is an irrational fear. Yet what is irrational about being concerned by the political ambitions of Islamism, terrorist attacks, the persecution of religious minorities in Islamic theocracies, the repression of apostates, or the imposition of religious law?
One can distinguish between Islam, Islamism, and the conduct of particular Muslim communities, but there is nothing inherently irrational about worrying about the consequences of religious doctrines or political movements. Indeed, refusing to do so would be the irrational position.
The distinction between Muslims and Islam is not difficult to understand. Muslims are people, possessing the same individual dignity and entitlement to freedom as everyone else. Islam is a religion, and like every religion, it is an intellectual and theological construct open to examination. One deserves respect as a person. The other deserves no immunity from scrutiny.
Islamophobia awareness campaigns obscure this elementary distinction. They create an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to police their language, second-guess their opinions, and retreat from legitimate criticism for fear of being branded bigots, at best, or physically attacked or killed, at worst. This is how Islamists have managed to impose de facto blasphemy laws across Europe.
This is particularly pernicious when discussing Islamism, the ideological movement that seeks to organize political and social life according to a particular interpretation of Islam. Its vision for the world is seventh century Arabia.
The distinction between ordinary Muslims and Islamists matters enormously. Millions of Muslims reject political extremism, authoritarian religious rule, and terrorism. They are commonly among its victims. That makes it all the more important that the ideology itself can be discussed openly.
And there are consequences for getting this wrong. How are we supposed to discuss the persecution of Christians in Pakistan, the treatment of women under the Taliban, the murder of apostates, the suppression of dissent in Iran, or the vile antisemitism that Islamist organizations propagate if criticism of the religious and ideological frameworks involved can be dismissed as prejudice?
And what of the Jews?
The obsession with Islamophobia has developed alongside a deep reluctance in “progressive” circles to confront antisemitism within Islamist movements and Muslim-majority societies. The same people who demand sensitivity towards religious minorities often display astonishing indifference towards Jewish vulnerability. The same activists who insist that religious identity must never be stigmatized routinely excuse, rationalize, or minimize hostility towards Jews when it comes wrapped in the language of anti-Zionism.
Then there is the fact that always gets you in trouble for stating it. Muslims are often behind antisemitic attacks but Jews are rarely behind anti-Muslim bigotry. The irony is grotesque. Jews understand better than most the dangers of being collectively blamed for the actions, beliefs, or conduct of others. Precisely for that reason, we should reject collective hostility towards Muslims. Yet we should also reject the proposition that protecting Muslims requires protecting Islam from criticism. It does not.
Another problem with the entire awareness industry is its assumption that the answer to social prejudice is awareness. Awareness is as interesting as choosing paint colors when the choices are cream, white, ivory, off-white or beige.
We have developed an unhealthy appetite for commemorative months, awareness days, educational slogans, and institutional declarations. The more complex the problem, the more likely someone is to reduce it to a poster.
And awareness of what, exactly? That Muslims are people? That they should not be assaulted or discriminated against? These are elementary principles, not revolutionary discoveries requiring an annual campaign. Or is the real objective to establish a cultural convention in which criticizing Islam is socially unacceptable? If it is the former, the campaign is unnecessary. If it is the latter, it is dangerous.
A genuinely liberal society does not protect people by placing their beliefs beyond criticism. It protects their freedom to hold those beliefs, practice their religion, change their religion, or abandon religion altogether. That freedom must extend equally to those who wish to challenge, reject, or ridicule religious doctrines.
Freedom of religion necessarily includes freedom from religion. Freedom of belief necessarily includes freedom to criticize belief. And freedom of expression means nothing if it evaporates whenever somebody states an opinion deemed offensive.
The answer to anti-Muslim bigotry is not Islamophobia Awareness Month. It is a consistent defense of individual liberty, equal treatment, and the right to live without intimidation or discrimination. These principles need no religious qualification and no fashionable terminology.
We must be able to condemn an attack on a Muslim without endorsing Islam, and defend a Muslim woman’s freedom to wear a hijab — or not to do so. We must be able to oppose discrimination against Muslims while insisting that religious doctrines, including Islamic doctrines, remain open to uncompromising scrutiny. This is the foundation of liberalism.
The stupidity of Islamophobia Awareness Month is that it takes a perfectly legitimate objective (combating prejudice against Muslims) and attaches it to a deeply problematic concept that risks confusing protection of people with protection of ideas. There is no need to manufacture a new category of prejudice to explain why Muslims deserve the same rights as everyone else, or to make Islam a special case, or to pretend that criticism of a religion constitutes hatred of its adherents.
Islam is not a protected species of thought. It is a religion, not a person. It has no entitlement to immunity from criticism, no exemption from historical examination, and no special dispensation from the principles of free expression. Perhaps what we really need is not Islamophobia Awareness Month, but a little more awareness of what liberalism actually means.
Correct, all religions can be criticized. There's no Islam exception. In fact, CDR (Criticize, Deconstruct, Ridicule) of Radical Islam may become the only way left to promote self-deportation of Radical Islamists and their families.