Defeating Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism Requires Challenging All Our Biases
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The world is so familiar yet so different than it was when my family was victimized by terrorism cloaked as Islamic fundamentalism on September 11, 2001. Lies and hatred spread quickly then, too, even without the internet having as much of a presence in our lives: I remember very distinctly the suspicion my family faced for being perceived as Muslim – though we were a mix of atheist and Catholic – it didn’t matter. Our names were our mark, and even the news that my uncle died in the Twin Towers didn’t soften glares, it sharpened them.
“Was he the one driving the plane?” A peer remarked.
Funny enough, it happened in an elective program teaching young people about acceptance of diversity. A group of aspiring movement folks getting our feet wet in civil society. I can’t blame the stupidity of a teenage boy who was likely fed a steady diet of distrust for Muslims, but I hoped he and others learned over time that the harassment faced by Muslim communities post-9/11 was a cancerous hatred that left no one safer, and in fact threatened all of us. I fear I was wrong and there’s still a lot of work to do.
People have deemed the terrorist attacks across Israel on October 7 as “Israel’s 9/11.” I have always hated measurements of death in the scale of 9/11’s, but this is especially worrying in its implications. An unfortunate parallel exists in that just like in the Western World after September 11, 2001, the state of Israel has responded to the brutal attacks on their citizens with astounding, indiscriminate cruelty, and the resulting carnage of over 14,000 and rising is often given less media attention than the original blow – as horrific as it was. [1, 2]
But baked into the idea that a state can experience their own 9/11 is the notion that violence isn’t supposed to happen there, to them. It becomes a placeholder for the idea that one place exhibits civility, experiencing deservedly frictionless lives suddenly interrupted by a single day of horror. This is contrasted with the other side’s presumed ‘barbarity’ – a condition that invites and deserves ongoing violence, and thus requires violent suppression. In late 2001 and onward, we saw that in the form of a variety of dehumanizing portrayals of Muslims, which led to sparse, limited, often whispered public condemnations from the U.S. general public against the decades of warring in Afghanistan and Iraq, and minimal action against Islamophobia faced by U.S. Muslims or those perceived as Muslim. Many still won’t forgive The Chicks for their condemnation of the war, but have little to say about hate crimes and bigotry faced by Muslims in this country over the past 22 years. [3, 4]
The same dynamic plays out in our own communities, where some areas and the people who inhabit them are treated as inherently violent – typically those areas are inner cities or places where Black people and other people of color live in higher density. But it’s felt in rural regions as well, and especially around Native American reservations. These beliefs are used to justify greater surveillance, policing, state violence, and denial of resources to those in need.
And who benefits? White Christian supremacy is propped up by scapegoating other faith groups and ethnicities, allowing those with less power to fight amongst each other, weakening each other instead of threatening Christian political goals, resources, and power. Christian supremacy sighs in relief when it’s given an opportunity to continue believing Muslims and other groups are less human and less deserving of safety than white Christians.
The same goes for Anti-Semitism: it only benefits Christian supremacy to paint the actions of the Israeli state as rubber-stamped by all Jewish people, and peddling Anti-Semitic tropes only allows state and interpersonal violence against Jewish people and others to fester. Most recently, three young Palestinian men were shot in Vermont, seemingly for wearing Palestinian keffiyeh scarves. [7] All while a mass movement of Jewish organizing is pleading for no violence in their name, and many Jewish people are fearing being targeted by violence, discrimination, and intimidation when their identity and community is wrongly blamed for the world’s hurts. [8]
The U.S. anti-abortion movement has been especially keen to weigh in on a deadly overseas conflict when they usually only care about the so-called unborn stateside. It’s plainly because these narratives suit their white Christian supremacist goals. They mock the devastating Holocaust against Jewish people to disparage abortion, and pretend to support Jewish people and Israel in the process. [9-14] Their actions are not coming from a place of compassion and care for Jewish people, but hatred towards anyone not white or Christian, and indifference at best to the plight of Jewish people – with many believing the brutal war will fulfill their own religious beliefs, portending the end of the world and second coming of Jesus. [15]
Unfortunately, left, right, and center are all guilty of swallowing lies that seem to justify hatred, violence, and brutal state suppression. As movement-builders, it is our responsibility to challenge the lies and bigotry wherever we meet them. Those seeking a world of freedom and justice cannot win when we carry water for white Christian supremacy. We must root out Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia – like all forms of hate, racism, and othering – in our movement spaces, in our communities, and most importantly: in our own heads and hearts. The first battle must be personal and interpersonal, or all others fall flat.
Sources:
1 – https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-death-toll.html
4 – https://abcnews.go.com/US/20-years-911-islamophobia-continues-haunt-muslims/story?id=79732049
5 – https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1065-on-antisemitism
6 – https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/anti-zionism-not-anti-semitism/675888/
8 – https://abcnews.go.com/US/antisemitism-rise-us-amid-ongoing-israel-hamas-war/story?id=104485604
9 – https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/08/if-palestinians-wanted-peace-and-prosperity-theyd-already-have-it/
10 – https://twitter.com/BryanKemper/status/1722223478458470437
11 – https://twitter.com/BryanKemper/status/1726330508613988434
12 – https://twitter.com/KristanHawkins/status/1716918463468650533
13 – https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/1728823907128651834
14 – https://twitter.com/FRCdc/status/1713219602790948950