The hatred of, or prejudice against moslems or the Islamic religion.
We should stop using the rather abstract term “Islamophobia” and replace it with the concrete and relatable “anti-moslem” in order to drive
home the severity of “Islamophobic” bigotry affecting a rapidly growing demographic within Western societies.
Where the antisemite is by
definition dangerous, a term like Islamophobe makes the moslem-hater seem rather timid, implying that he is not a source of danger but a victim, merely reacting to an exogenous bogeyman with the most
human of emotions which all of us have experienced at some point in our lives: fear.
This brand of hierarchical discrimination, selective downplaying and semantic antics also characterises discourses of gender, sexuality and race: the
man who hates women is not a women-hater but is allowed to dwell in the luxury of a lofty term such as “misogynist”; the
gay-hater is sanitised as a “
homophobe” and the racist whitewashed as a “xenophobe”, both monikers implying that there is some characteristic within homosexuals and foreigners that triggers legitimate fear in mainstream
society, thus making the
two somehow complicit in the crime of other people despising them.
Islamophobia is a form of
racism mixed with cultural intolerance. Islamophobia targets markers of moslem identity. Evident in how perpetrators of Islamophobic hate crime disproportionately target visibly moslem women, in the same way that
racism often targets people for the colour of their
skin.
