Looking at a cartoon that portrays American Muslims as terrorists-to-be from the perspective of free speech versus censorship alone absolves us from asking what the intention behind it is, or what context it appears in. The context in this case is one of increasing Islamophobia in Europe and North America, from the furore caused by proposals for a mosque in Manhattan to the fact that provision of halal meat has become a defining issue in the French presidential campaign. The depiction of Muslims in the New York Post as hook-nosed Semites is no coincidence, sharing much in common with the anti-Jewish stereotypes widely prevalent not so long ago, when attacks on Jews as people masqueraded as critiques of their religious practices. This makes it difficult to uphold a classical liberal distinction between criticising “beliefs” and criticising “people”, for the two are conflated in the racialised manner in which Muslims are often discussed.
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Yet the existence of Muslims who use accusations of Islamophobia as a political ploy to shut down dissent within Muslim communities does not make the reality of Islamophobia irrelevant. After all, antisemitism is no less real just because it has been exploited as a smear with which to silence critics of Israel. Muslims and non-Muslims alike have always engaged critically and creatively with the Islamic tradition, both reverently and irreverently.
Their right to do so must be beyond question. However, criticism of religion does not exist in a vacuum of ideas, abstracted from any wider political context. In this vein, it is worth asking what function the disproportionate fixation with diagnosing Islam’s ills fulfils in much of Europe and North America today. Could this too be a political ploy, to disguise and displace deeper anxieties about the direction our societies are taking at a time of immense political and economic upheaval? More here.
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more on who funds islamophobia in this report: $42 Million From Seven Foundations Helped Fuel The Rise Of Islamophobia In America.