American Muslims Accused of Islamaphobia

Muslims have a serious Islamophobia problem. That’s the claim being made by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) which found that 30% of Muslims believe that Muslims are "more prone to negative behavior."

That’s far higher than Jews at 13%, Catholics at 12% and Protestants at 11%. 18% of Muslims, the poll found, believe that Muslims are “more prone to violence”.…The only group more likely to believe that Muslims are more violent than other religious organizations are white evangelicals at 23%.

Dalia Mogahed, ISPU’s director of research, blames this on "internalized Islamophobia.” According to her, “Muslims have themselves internalized negative stereotypes about their own community” based on the media. Even though the media covers Muslims far more positively than any other religious group.

Mogahed was picked by Obama for his Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. She's collaborated with Muslim Brotherhood front groups and has been accused of mainstreaming them.

And her claim of internalized Islamophobia makes no sense.

Muslims are far less likely than any other religious group to believe that they discriminate against women. Only 12% of Muslims think that’s a problem compared to 23% of Jews, 29% of Catholics and 36% of white evangelicals. If Muslims have “internalized” Islamophobic ideas, it’s odd that they haven’t internalized the most popular criticism of their religion, the one that a quarter of the general public agrees with, but that they instead do admit that Islam has a serious problem with violence.

That Muslims get their perception of Muslims from the media is a rather strange claim. The media is also heavily biased toward Islam, not against it. It always strives to portray Islam as an unambiguously positive phenomenon while insisting that Islamic violence has nothing to do with the religion.

That’s why the non-Muslims in the poll reject the linkage between Islam and violence. They’re the ones who are being influenced by the media. And their views reflect the messaging of the media.

Whether or not the average Muslim knows someone involved in violence, the odds are fairly good that he or she originates in the first or second generation from a country with a serious terrorism problem. Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Turkey, Somalia, Chechnya, Jordan and Lebanon account for much of the Muslim population of the United States. All of these countries either sponsor terrorists or experience terrorist attacks. Political and religious violence is either ongoing or just under the surface.

Dalia Mogahed is Egyptian. And so she ought to know how that works. Most Muslims come from countries torn apart by political and religious violence. Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Iraq and Libya, to name five countries that many Muslims immigrated from, are in a permanent civil war. Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan are a bad week away from getting there.

These are the absurdities that the Brotherhood’s Islamophobia industry expects us to swallow….Islamophobia is a manufactured term that suppresses criticism of Islam by non-Muslims and Muslims. If Muslims have an Islamophobia problem, it’s a very good problem to have. Societies don’t grow by killing their critics with machetes (Bangladesh), stabbing them (Iran) or hanging them (Pakistan)….When 30% of Muslims are willing to admit that their culture has a problem, that’s healthy. And when the Muslim Brotherhood and the left silences them by calling them Islamophobes, that’s the phobia.

(Greenfield, “American Muslims Accused of Islamophobia,” FrontPageMag Online, 5/11/18).