Opponents in political debate often accuse each other of harboring a “phobia.” This allows weak thinkers to avoid the trouble of making a coherent and substantive argument. They can brush aside contrary opinions as being held due to ignorance and fear, thus dismissing the other guy as stupid and bigoted.
The accusation of “homophobia” proved highly effective a generation ago, and it had the merit of containing some truth, for among opponents of gay marriage there were some motivated less by principle than by gut reaction — a primeval squeamishness.
The phobia alleged most often today, Islamophobia, is very different and is mostly a lie. Tellingly, the charge of “Islamophobia” began being hurled promiscuously only after Islamists gave the rest of us good reason to detest them in 2001 with the murders of 3,000 in America, and later of 1,200 in Israel last Oct 7.
For more than two decades, apologists for Islamic extremism have found it convenient to deploy this reflexive cod-psychological rubbish to deflect and defame rational abhorrence. Thus, charges of unthinking prejudice against Muslims suddenly proliferated just when sensible people began to realize in large numbers that something seriously wrong was happening in the Muslim world and was being exported to the rest of us.
I’ve seen firsthand what Islamism does to a culture within the Muslim world. I lived in Khartoum, Sudan, in the 1980s and saw the easy-going city I’d known in the 1970s, with its cosmopolitan population living tolerantly side by side — there were even charming if rather down-at-heel nightclubs — turn into a place of darkness and menace. The horrors began soon after the country’s dictator, pandering to fanatics, introduced Sharia law and symbolically poured beer into the River Nile to mark the adoption of teetotal tyranny.
Criminals who avoided execution began being “crucified” at Kober prison, in a section of the city close to the Blue Nile. Crucifixion was the name given in the Sharia penal system to the public amputation of the hands and feet of wrongdoers. I occasionally used to pass near the prison on days when these gruesome sentences were being carried out and they always drew a sinister, muttering, febrile crowd, unlike the civilians I’d seen 10 years earlier.
It is bad enough when a culture inflicts such stuff on itself, but what we’ve witnessed since the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, just a few years after the disturbing transformation I’d attended in Sudan, is the imperialist export of Islamism beyond the traditional boundaries of the Islamic world. It is now rampant across the West, taking advantage of the tolerance of societies it wishes to destroy. And it ramps up demands for acceptance with mendacious accusations of Islamophobia when decent people respond with horror and anger to Islamism’s atrocities.
Western capitals and campuses have been swarmed by this vicious movement since October, and when people reject the obviously false equivalence it suggests between Israel’s just war and Hamas’s enormities, they are accused of Islamophobia. One of many recent examples came from Mehdi Hasan, a militant Left-wing journalist who criticized a columnist for writing about antisemitism but not about a “parallel rise in Islamophobia.”
But, while Jew-hatred, which is what people tend to mean by “antisemitism,” is a genuine phobia — an irrational, visceral fear and loathing untethered to facts — antipathy toward political Islam is no such thing. It is a rational hostility toward religious barbarism. Jihadis, whether members of Hamas, ISIS, or others of that ilk kill, torture, hijack, kidnap, and otherwise terrorize blameless people who live by different values than they do.
Being repelled by them is evidence not of bigotry or phobia but of decency and open-mindedness. It is right and reasonable to feel determined animosity toward Hamas and disgust for the 75% of Palestinians who tell pollsters they approve of the butchery their armed forces perpetrated last autumn.
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The vile ideology upon which Hamas is built is hostile to all infidels, as the recent Islamic State group attack on a club in Moscow, which killed at least 139 people, has just demonstrated. Islamic fascists focus more often on Israel, America, and the rest of the decadent West because they recognize that our freedom, democracy, wealth, and fun exercise a stronger pull than Putinism can on the hearts and minds of people around the world. We are therefore a greater threat to the success of the global caliphate they want to build.
They must be stopped. We must stop them. And we make a start by always and everywhere challenging the bogus accusation of “islamophobia.” We need to defend our civilization. It is superior, and — this is just as important — it is ours, and we prefer it. Our dislike of what threatens it, and is often presented unambiguously as determined to replace it, is the result not of a demeaning gut fear but of a laudable and logical attachment to what is very much better.
